Hyperic raises its Series B

Ah, more money pouring into open source companies each day. Today, Hyperic announced that it has closed on its Series B funding:

Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that it has secured $6.1 million in a second round of venture capital funding led by Benchmark Capital with Accel Partners. Bootstrapped by the co-founders since 2004, Hyperic raised an initial $3.8 million round in May 2006 from the same two investors. Since January 1, Hyperic’s customer portfolio has increased by 100 percent and its community based deployments have expanded by more than 625 percent….

The pre-emptive round of funding will enable Hyperic to aggressively expand its product portfolio and customer support to keep pace with rapid adoption of its Hyperic HQ product line. Since launching in March 2004, Hyperic has grown from the five original founders to more than 25 employees. In the same time frame, the company has grown from three charter customers to more than 300 enterprise customers—including eHarmony, Ask.com, Hi5, Ogilvy and Mather, and MyNewPlace.com —and has a full pipeline. Additionally, Hyperic has OEM agreements with technology leaders MySQL, JBoss and MuleSource.

I talked with Javier today and he mentioned that he’s struggling to spend all the venture money, given the discipline that his years of bootstrapping taught him. I offered to help him out….

Seriously, this is a great investment. The systems management space has proven especially healthy for open source, supporting Hyperic, GroundWork, Zenoss, OpenNMS, and others. It’s not a great market if only one open source project can subsist in it. The more, the merrier.