BW: Red Hat, Inc. Announces Red Hat Ventures Investment Unit

“Red Hat, the market leader in open source Internet
infrastructure solutions, today announced the formation of Red Hat
Ventures, a new division of Red Hat devoted to supporting Open
Source and Internet infrastructure startups through a combination
of direct venture funding and strategic business relationships with
Red Hat. Red Hat Ventures’ objective is to leverage Red Hat’s
leadership in the Open Source & Linux market to accelerate the
breadth of tools, services and technologies available to customers,
and deliver on the promise of making Linux and other Open Source
technologies the platform of choice for deploying and extending
Internet infrastructure.“

“Red Hat has already taken stakes in a number of key Open
Source-related startups, including Sendmail Inc., Rackspace.com,
ZoneTrader.com, techies.com and e-smith. Red Hat Ventures will be
accelerating its investment activity, taking stakes of
$500,000-$2,000,000 in exciting new companies while simultaneously
establishing significant business relationships with those
companies. Rackspace.com and Zonetrader.com are key partners in the
recently launched redhat.com Marketplace.”

“It was important to us that Red Hat Ventures be much more than
a source of financing for these companies,” said Matthew Szulik,
President and CEO of Red Hat. “As the leading provider of
Linux-based Internet infrastructure solutions, we see huge
opportunities in creating true partnerships with these companies:
we accelerate their ability to reach the global Linux market and
they enhance our ability to offer the broadest range of Internet
solutions to enterprise customers.”

Press Release