Platform-as-a-service startup, 10gen, has scored their Series A investment from Union Square Ventures. Backed by proven management team, DoubleClick ex-CEO is one of the founder, company plans to take on Google App Engine and Amazon cloud computing offerings.

From their press release:

10gen (http://www.10gen.com/), creator of a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology that helps developers more quickly and easily build dynamic, scalable Web sites and applications, today 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.

Popular blog sites Clusterstock and Silicon Alley Insider are using 10gen cloud. Beats me why these blogs have to complicate simple Wordpress deployment architecture by going to custom cloud configuration?

Fact that it’s an open source play, it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Business model is cloudy and looks like this will go premium services route ( not unlike SourceLabs). In the absence of revenue models like Google Adsense and Amazon Shopping store, any startup to come and challenge these behemoth’s cloud computing offering is pure chest thumping.

10gen looks great and has all the right backing for it to become a serious player. What it lacks is a here-and-now reason for small shops to download and start using it. Maybe striking a deal with identi.ca will help it to get into start up market. It won’t happen since Union Square Venture funded Twitter competes with Identi.ca.

Download link: http://www.10gen.com/~~/f/10gen-src-nightly.tar.gz

(Caveat : We were not able to figure exact open source license. Will be digging on that soon. Specific type of open source license can significantly impact future growth curve of any open source software. Also it limits in how many ways software can be used.)