“IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given how rare it is for the company to make venture capital-style investments”

What? Dude Google IBM Venture Capital Group

IBM will typically seed a company it might be interested in buying down the road. A good example of this was Cyanea. IBM was an early investor in Cyanea and later purchased the company outright. Now Cyanea is one of their top Tivoli product brands (ITCAM). There are other similar examples to this.

johnmwillis.com

Opps .. looks like I should have read further before jumping the gun. You are right a “C” round investment is odd for IBM.

Sorry
John

[...] I am pleased to report that three month’s worth of work has finally paid off, and the employees at my company can relax a bit (or at least not work 70 hours a week).  Tuesday was the day of the big launch; we announced three major pieces of news, which were quickly picked up by a number of major sources including, but by no means limited to, the New York Times, CNN Money, and The 451 Group. [...]

[...] The ramp has been fairly steady; early support from the Linux community, and the company’s hiring of many of the Postgres team, gave it early credibility. By 2006, it had already begun effective partnering, with heavyweights like Sun weighing in, unveiled JBOSS support, added heavy hitters to its board of directors, and sustained a steady cadence of product releases. In 2008, after strong growth and international expansion in 2007, the firm raised $10M in funding to fuel further growth - and among the investors, close on the heels of Sun’s acquisition, was IBM, in a relatively unusual step. See the 451 Group’s discussion at the time here. [...]