10gen announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.

"At 10gen we are building a cloud stack from the ground up – including a database and application server -- with the design goal of running sites and services of all sizes," noted Dwight Merriman, Founder and CEO. "Rather than porting existing tools into the cloud, Web development can only prosper by building new technologies for this environment, technologies which are available in an open way such that many companies and other entities can collaborate on their development."

10gen's team is creating a virtual Web application server and database from distributed computing resources with the goal of providing horizontal scalability and geographical redundancy that is secure, transparent and easy to manage through a high-performance grid-aware object database, automatic on-demand application scaling and site management, deployment and performance evaluation tools. The application server supports JavaScript as its first development language, with Ruby support in early testing and other languages on the product roadmap.

"The 10gen team brings together a great vision for cloud computing with amazing experience in building Internet scale systems," said Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, who will be joining 10gen's board of directors. "We are excited to support them in their effort to provide the development community with an open source platform-as-a-service."