Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, today announced that it has secured $20 million in series D funding. The funding round was led by Greylock Partners, which is making its first investment in the company. Zend’s existing investors – Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital – are also participating in the Series D round.
“The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers,” said Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the co-founders of Zend Technologies. “It is great that a venture capital firm with the stature of Greylock Partners shares our vision for the PHP market and will help us realize Zend’s potential.”
The company further announced the election of Moshe Mor, a partner at Greylock, to its board of directors.
“The transition from traditional software development methods to web based and service oriented approaches is creating enormous opportunities for dynamic languages such as PHP,” says Moshe Mor of Greylock Partners. “Zend is uniquely positioned to lead this transition, and has the talent and depth to make it a reality. I am excited to become part of this team.”
Zend Technologies has gained broad recognition as one of the major commercial drivers behind the success of PHP, which has a profound impact on the way modern web applications are being created. It is the language of choice behind more than half of all Ajax-enabled, highly interactive Web 2.0 websites. It is also the language of choice for companies embracing service oriented architectures, creating and mixing webservices into a whole new generation of sophisticated commercial applications. More than 20 million dynamic websites worldwide are driven by PHP.
In addition to supporting key open source PHP initiatives, Zend offers commercial products and services for software developers and system operators who use PHP. Zend has more than 15,000 customers for its commercial products. In its recent “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers,2Q06” Gartner positioned Zend in the Challengers Quadrant.
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