Digium Secures First Round of Funding with Matrix Partners

Cash infusion highlights Digium’s leadership position in open source telephony

Digium Inc., the original creator of Asterisk and pioneer of open source telephony, recently announced it has closed its first round of Venture Capital funding, receiving $13.8 million from Matrix Partners a leading U.S. based venture capital firm. The funding will help fuel the continued growth of Digium and Asterisk, especially in launching new offerings for the enterprise communications market, ranging from small to large businesses.

“We have maintained steady growth and have been consistently profitable. We felt seeking outside funding was unnecessary, but Matrix Partners’ success and vision in the open source industry was too compelling to ignore,” said Mark Spencer, president of Digium and creator of Asterisk. “Matrix’s experience as a JBoss initial investor, was a key differentiator. Early on, we realized Matrix’s involvement would help us grow more quickly.”

The company’s customers include a diverse group of small to medium businesses, large enterprises, non-profits, branch and remote offices, contact centers, carriers and service providers, that are all leveraging the cost savings, flexibilities and feature-rich capabilities an Asterisk-based telephony solution offers.

“We believe Digium has the potential to become one of our most successful open source companies, as every company in the world relies on telephony and the use of PBXs in order to run their businesses,” said David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners and JBoss board member. “As companies continue to be attracted to the cost savings and powerful new capabilities of Voice over IP, the opportunity for Digium becomes massive. Digium is definitely in a position to become the next big open source company, behind Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL. Their current revenues, profitability, and growth rates are extraordinary.”

With the anticipated growth of IP-based communications and the continued acceptance of open source, Digium has a unique opportunity to become a dominant player in the telecommunications market. Additionally, because of the built-in flexibility of Asterisk, companies are able to build hybrid PBX solutions (a combination of legacy and VoIP equipment) in migrating to a VoIP system.