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Investors have put $12.5 million in Series E financing into business intelligence software company Jaspersoft Corp. in the hope that a tough economic outlook will boost the company's sales.

New investor Adams Street Partners led the round, which included participation from all of the company's existing investors. Red Hat Inc. also participated in the round. Brian Gentile, the company's chief executive, declined to provide the valuation.

Jaspersoft provides open source reporting and analytics software, which can be had for a fraction of the cost of licensed software offered by competitors, according to Dave Welsh, a partner with Adams Street.

With companies tightening spending, several areas of open source software will be ripe for growth, especially those that are an alternative to an expensive purchase, such as business intelligence, Welsh said. "Back in the last recession, Linux, and in large part Red Hat, took huge market share away from Sun [Microsystems Inc.] and others."

Jaspersoft will use the proceeds of the round to expand geographically and to continue to develop its products, Gentile said.

In the last year, the company had seen rapid growth in Europe and plans to put more people there to continue that trend. It will also begin adding staff to those parts of Asia where it has seen demand through downloads of its product, Gentile said.

Jaspersoft has more than 9,000 commercial customers and expects this round to be enough to get the company to profitability, Gentile said, though he declined to give the company's revenue.

This summer, the company signed a partnership with Red Hat, where Jaspersoft's reporting functionality will be embedded into future versions of Red Hat Network Satellite systems management product. The first version of the product with Jaspersoft is expected to be released in the first half of next year, Gentile said.

JasperSoft, based in San Francisco, last raised financing with a $12 million Series D round in August 2007 led by Scale Venture Partners. Its other investors include SAP Ventures, DCM, Morgenthaler Ventures and Partech International. The company has raised $35.3 million to date, according to VentureWire records.

JasperSoft was founded in 2001 under the name Pansopic and launched as a commercial open source company in 2005. This is the third round it has raised as an open source software company.

As a result of the recent financing, Welsh will join the company's board of directors.

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