Grid Startup Grabs $3 Million

Grid startup ActiveGrid today announced that it has raked in $3 million in Series A funding, and the company is taking a unique approach to its first product launch.

The funds will be used to rollout the companys flagship software, Grid Application Server, which is being targeted at Fortune 1000 firms doing transaction-intensive work on their corporate grids.

And, at least initially, the software will be free. Yes, that’s right -- the basic version of Grid Application Server, due to be launched in January, is open source. This could be a shrewd move by the San Francisco-based vendor as it strives to win developers onto the platform and build a solid user base.

Filthy lucre can wait, but not forever, according to Jeff Veis, ActiveGrid’s vice president of marketing. A higher-end version of the software with special features for transaction processing will be commercially available in the second quarter of next year, he says.

From their offices behind Pacific Bell Park, ActiveGrid has got some serious open source plans for its baby. The San Franciscans will be running their software on the LAMP Web development platform. LAMP, which has been growing in popularity for grid computing, is essentially an open source platform based on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and the PHP-programming language.But they are hedging their bets. Grid Application Server will also integrate with J2EE and Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) .Net, says Veis.

The initial funding round was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, although fellow Bay-area VCs Allegis Capital also participated.

But will $3 million be enough? Veis is sure that it will. “It will set us up for the short term and we will evaluate business conditions as we go,” he says. However, another funding round is expected to take place within the next year, he adds.

And what about staffing levels? ActiveGrid currently has ten employees, although the company is now “hiring aggressively," according to Veis. He refuses, however, to provide any specific numbers.

So, who are the guys behind ActiveGrid? The company was founded last year by Peter Yared, a former exec at Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW). Veis, another former Sun staffer, worked closely with Yared on Sun’s Web services offering, the Liberty Alliance, during their time together in Santa Clara. The project was launched back in September 2001 to develop an open solution for network identity, with members as diverse as General Motors and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), so Yared and Veis are no strangers to schmoozing the industry.Prior to Sun, Yared was CTO of application server specialist NetDynamics, which was swallowed up by Scott McNealy’s hardware monster back in 1998.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum