Intel, SAP among VCs investing $18.5 million in MySQL

MySQL has secured $18.5 million in its latest round of venture capital funding, the open source database vendor announced Monday. The company plans to spend the money on new product development and expanding its sales and marketing operations. The investors include the venture capital arms of Intel and enterprise applications vendor SAP.

Venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led the Series C round of financing, which included investments from Intel Capital, SAP Ventures, Linux distribution firm Red Hat and Presidio STX, according to a release. Based in the U.S., Presidio is the early stage IT investment subsidiary of Japanese trading and investment firm Sumitomo.

Including the Series C funding, MySQL has attracted around $39 million in VC investment to date. The company’s last round of investment, its Series B financing, led by Benchmark Capital took place in May 2003 and raised $19.5 million.

Venture capitalists are currently falling over each other to invest in the open source companies that they see as presenting a threat to long-time proprietary players in different areas of the software market. MySQL competes with Oracle, IBM and Microsoft in the enterprise database market.

MySQL has been expanding its locations of late, recently opening a new subsidiary in Japan, MySQL KK, and planning to open a U.K. office in Dublin, Ireland, next month. The privately held company has headquarters in Uppsala, Sweden, and the U.S. in Cupertino, Calif.