Web technology company Cape Clear Software yesterday announced it had raised $16 million (€18.6 million) in second-round funding through two leading US venture capital firms, Accel Partners and Greylock.

Following the funding, Mr Kevin Comilli of Accel Partners and Mr Aneel Bhusri of Greylock will join the company's board of directors.

"This round of funding gives us the resources to take advantage of the market opportunity and more importantly brings the expertise of both Accel Partners and Greylock into our management team," said chief executive, Mr David Clarke.

Cape Clear, which was founded in 1999 and employs 55 staff, develops and markets software products that enable companies to make their existing IT systems work together. It has offices in Dublin, London and California.

"The software business has been creating and solving incompatibility for decades," Cape Clear's executive chairman and Iona Technologies cofounder Mr Annrai O'Toole said.

"Cape Clear believes it is time to provide the tools that all developers can use, to make incompatibility a thing of the past, to deliver, if you like, ubiquitous middleware." Greylock general partner Mr Aneel Bhusri said he believed Cape Clear was aggressively rolling out products that had the potential to revolutionise how corporations and developers integrated their internal applications and delivered that functionality over the Internet.

He said Greylock, which was a US-based early-stage venture capital firm with more than $2.2 billion in committed capital, had been impressed with Cape Clear's commercial evolution and its vision to date.

Mr Bhusri said it could enable corporations to solve IT problems quickly and easily.