Zend Technologies, “The PHP Company”, announced today (press release) that it has raised an additional $20M U.S. in its Series D funding round. Stephen Shankland at c|net posted information about this last night, but I was waiting until the official announcement today to post a blog entry.

The latest funding round was led by Greylock Partners, as a new investor, with participation from the existing investors - Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital. A blog post from Om Malik (”In Zend (And PHP) We Invest“) lists the total Zend investment to date at $36.7M U.S.

What people aren’t mentioning in the coverage of this announcement is that Zend is a company without a CEO. This is the largest investment I’ve seen in an open source company without a CEO at the helm. The last press release from Zend mentioning (former) CEO Doron Gerstel is dated April 12th: “Zend Announces Zend Guard 4 - New version improves distribution and code protection for PHP applications“. Doron is now the President of Syneron, a non-surgical medical aesthetics equipment company - quite a change from what he was doing at Zend. Such is the nature of PR to praise the incoming management (I found out about this from a Syneron press release!), but to make no mention of departures (or the search). I am a bit surprised that Zend would announce the new round of funding without attaching it to a CEO announcement. It’s been over four months since Doron left.