Open-source firm MuleSource lands additional $12.5 million

MuleSource said on Tuesday that it has raised a second round of $12.5 million, adding to an initial $4 million it raised last fall. This latest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

MuleSource provides support services around Mule, an open-source integration server based on standards, a product category referred to as an enterprise services bus (ESB). The software provides the plumbing for moving information between applications.

"Open source is effecting the same type of evolution in enterprise integration that it brought to the operating system and application server,? said Ravi Mhatre, general partner at Lightspeed in a statement. "Mule has by far the largest installed base, the most mature technology and the most active developer community. We believe MuleSource has the opportunity to dominate this category."

There are several other open-source ESBs and integration products based on different integration standards, including products from JBoss, Sun, and Iona, which last month acquired LogicBlaze, another open-source ESB provider.

MuleSource said that there have been 650,000 total downloads of Mule and more than 1,000 enterprise production deployments. It released results of survey on Monday indicating that 57 percent of the 500 Mule users surveyed said they take advantage of source code access to make customizations.