Sacramento born Engine Yard has raised $3.5 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital. The company, now located in San Francisco, still has data centers and several employees in Sacramento.

Engine Yard didn’t start out looking for funding. They are already profitable and didn’t see their Rails hosting and support business as lucrative enough to get the large payouts venture companies often require.

Benchmark Capital came calling after they continued to get pitched by startups that were using Rails as their technology. Benchmark saw that Engine Yard’s technologies might allow then to grow a software business to provide technology to Ruby on Rails startups. Engine Yard is one of the chief supporters of Rubinius, a high performance virtual machine for Ruby, and Merb a Rails-compatible framework that promises higher performance.

Much of the money will be used to accelerate development of these projects. Last month, Engine Yard hired the Rubinius core developers after hiring project lead Evan Phoenix last May. Engine Yard co-founder Ezra Zygmuntowicz is the lead developer of Merb.

This is Engine Yard’s first round of equity financing. They previously closed $2.5 million in lease financing to help build out more data centers.