Layer 7 Technologies Inc., a developer of XML security and networking appliances, today announced the completion of a US $8.9 million Series B round of financing.

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) Venture Capital, Working Opportunity Fund (EVCC) Ltd./GrowthWorks Capital and Shoreline Venture Partners II LP/Shoreline Venture Management, LLC, all existing investors, participated in the financing.

The new funding will help Layer 7 significantly expand its commercial and public sector sales organizations and expand its sales footprint into Europe, said Layer 7 Technologies.

"We believe Layer 7 is well positioned to take a large share of the emerging SOA security market and we are pleased to lead this financing," said Joe Timlin, VP of Investments for GrowthWorks Capital and a director of Layer 7 Technologies. "With the recent market growth in SOA and Web 2.0 we see tremendous opportunity for infrastructure that can help secure, simplify and scale Web service deployments."

"This funding represents a tremendous vote of confidence in the company and its growth strategy," commented Ed Koepfler, CEO of Layer 7 Technologies. "With the increasing enterprise focus on XML for enabling service-centric integration and information sharing, the need for XML security and networking infrastructure has never been greater."

Vancouver based Layer 7 Technologies is a provider of XML security and networking infrastructure for next generation service oriented and Web oriented integrations. Its SecureSpan family of XML appliances and gateway software address the security, complexity, performance and networking issues associated with deploying and maintaining production Web services.