PaaS vendor Apprenda gets boost with $16M Series C financing
Posted by | November 20, 2013
For sixty years, Safeguard has been supporting entrepreneurs and funding innovations that have had a transformative impact on our lives. Today, we continued that tradition by announcing that we led a $16 million Series C financing round for Apprenda, the leading enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) powering the next generation of enterprise software development in public, private and hybrid clouds
We believe that Apprenda is a game changer in the enterprise cloud application market. The company’s platform significantly accelerates the development of cloud applications—legacy and new for private or public clouds—in the same way that commercial application servers accelerated the movement to three tier development. Equally important is that Apprenda scales applications at the work load level, dramatically improving hardware utilization and application management. Apprenda has achieved extraordinary traction with thousands of enterprise applications running in production on their platform. With a great team of co-investors coupled with a strong management team, we are excited to support Apprenda as they expand their leadership in this important new category in enterprise cloud computing.
What will Apprenda do with the funds? Here’s an excerpt from Apprenda CEO’s Sinclair Schuller’s blog post addressing that exact question:
“The goal with this latest funding round is to build on the successes we’ve had as a company: early customer wins, maturity of our customer base, enabling the world’s largest production private PaaS clouds, and happy customers in the best verticals to date; we want to use that as the primary foundation for what formulates our next steps. The main focus for Apprenda, the #1 private PaaS tech in the enterprise, is to invest heavily in our growth and drive a new inflection point for the business. The time for growth has never been better- we believe the market has matured, is primed and ready for PaaS, and as a company we have the best technology backed by the best team; we’re going to pursue an aggressive growth path that adds “fuel to this fire.” Our investments will be aggressive on the go to market side of things; sales & marketing and expanding our go-to-market approach through direct, as well as indirect means on the strategic alliances side.”
Safeguard led the Series C financing by deploying $12.1 million. Existing investors Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the round. With this financing, Safeguard acquired a twenty-two percent primary ownership stake in Apprenda and will hold two seats on Apprenda’s board of directors.
