Reductive Labs draws $2 million in venture funding

SAN FRANCISCO (Private Equity Week) - While venture capitalists have scaled back overall investment in early stage companies this year, startups with business models based on open source software continue to be comparatively successful in attracting funding.

The latest occurred late last month when Portland, Ore.-based Reductive Labs, a developer of tools used by IT systems administrators, raised a $2 million Series A round of funding.

True Ventures led the round and was joined by individual investors.

Reductive's core offering is a tool called Puppet that co-founder Andrew Shafer said allows IT administrators to automate many of their most repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Users of the open source-based tool, the company said, include Google, Twitter, Barclays Capital, Stanford University and the New York Stock Exchange.

"We really started this with the idea of makings systems administrators' lives better and easier," said Shafer, who co-founded the company with longtime systems administrator Luke Kanies. Shafer said Puppet will help companies save money by enabling IT departments to do more work without having to expand staff.

The funding of Reductive was the third open-source focused deal in June, following the venture backing of Cloudera and Lucid Imagination.

Burlingame, Calif.-based Cloudera raised $11 million from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. The company, founded in 2008, provides services and support for Hadoop, a software application that powers the data processing engines of websites.

Lucid Imagination, a provider of support and services for open source search servers, raised a strategic investment of undisclosed size from In-Q-Tel in June. In November, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company raised $6 million in early stage funding from Walden International and Granite Ventures.