Acquia, the web’s resource for the Drupal social publishing system, has secured $8 million in a Series B financing round from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia plans to use the funds for sales, marketing and additional product development to meet growing enterprise demand for the Drupal open source social publishing system.

Acquia offers businesses the quickest path to Social Publishing. Acquia’s Drupal web content management and community tools give brands the power to engage audiences, participate in their conversations and provide those communities with a hub—all necessary traits businesses now need to keep their competitive edge. Drupal with Acquia’s enterprise-grade services and support extends web sites at a lower TCO, for a fraction of the cost of proprietary legacy web content management systems.

“Community engagement through social publishing has completely upended the traditional notions of brand building and customer retention,” said Thomas Erickson, CEO, Acquia.

“With hundreds of thousands of downloads each month and over thousands of active contributors- one of the most active in the open source market- Drupal raises the bar on how social websites are built,” said John Mandile, Managing Director at Sigma Partners.

Drupal registers over 250,000 downloads per month, and is one of the most active open source projects on the Web. Drupal makes it easy to publish content, build communities and create original media. It’s used to deliver a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and core web content management. The Drupal project is supported by a huge and active ecosystem of consultants and developers making Drupal the social publishing platform for organizations as diverse as media and entertainment, non-profit, education and government.

As a member of the global Drupal community, Acquia is committed to advancing Drupal usage by providing simple solutions that offer the confidence, insurance, speed and ROI necessary to serve as an enterprise-ready content management system.