SAN FRANCISCO, CA, BonitaSoft, the leader in open source business process management (BPM), announced today it has secured $11 million in a Series B round of financing led by venture capital firm Serena Capital, which was founded by successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

The new funding round also included participation from the company's existing investors Ventech, based in Paris and Beijing, and Auriga Partners. BonitaSoft will use the new funding to accelerate product development and support broader international corporate expansion.

Recognized by Gartner as the only open source BPMS (Business Process Management Suite), BonitaSoft is disrupting the enterprise BPMS segment traditionally dominated by proprietary software vendors such as IBM Lombardi, Pegasystems, Oracle, and Tibco. "We continue to take marketshare and existing customers away from the established proprietary players," says BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura.

"Today's announcement is a testament to the value of BonitaSoft's mission to democratize BPM," continues Valdes Faura. "Our flexible, affordable BPMS bridges the communication and collaboration gap between business and technical audiences to enable users throughout an organization to realize the benefits from deploying BPM."

Particularly in these challenging economic times, organizations of all sizes are seeking ways to minimize costs and maximize value without sacrificing on expectations around the performance, functionality, and benefits of their business process deployments. BonitaSoft has greatly benefited from the climate of these times, joining the likes of commercial open source vendors Red Hat / JBoss, MySQL, SpringSource, and Talend in changing the economics of an established software category to become a leading player in its own right.

"While the market opportunity for BPM is strong, cost, interoperability with corporate systems, and efficiency are key barriers for many organizations," said Xavier Lorphelin, Managing Partner at Serena Capital. "With the right approach and a strong management team, BonitaSoft breaks down these barriers, making it cost-effective and easy for companies of all sizes and industries to leverage BPM."

"We're excited to be part of this second round of strategic financing," said Claire Houry, General Partner at Ventech. "BonitaSoft is creating real value for its customers in delivering critical components to make BPM successful. With our continued support, BonitaSoft will continue paving the way in open source BPM."

"Understanding the needs of both business and technical users, BonitaSoft is well poised to take advantage of the burgeoning opportunity with a wider audience of business users that are in need of affordable and flexible BPM," said M. Philippe Granger, partner at Auriga Partners. "This new financing will help accelerate the company's ability to further lead the open source BPM market."

The BonitaSoft suite includes an innovative design studio to create processes, a powerful BPM engine that can adapt to various information systems architectures, and a friendly end-user interface for managing and interacting with processes. With a single click, users can turn processes into business applications based upon the underlying business process model. Very importantly, the solution is flexible enough to interoperate with internal and external systems thanks to the library of hundreds of Connectors and vibrant community of 8,000 members who also contribute connectors, business processes and other extensions.

About BonitaSoft

BonitaSoft democratizes business process management (BPM) by bringing powerful, easy-to-integrate, and user-friendly, open source BPM to organizations of all sizes and industries. BonitaSoft and its open source community deliver an unmatched ecosystem of connectors for nearly any application and system. With the BonitaSoft suite, organizations can model, automate and optimize process workflows in Finance, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, E-Government, and more, according to their respective business or technical roles. The fastest-growing BPM provider, BonitaSoft has more than 800,000 downloads, 180 customers and 8,000 community members.