Appcelerator Pulls Another $15M, Expands to Europe and Asia
Appcelerator raised an impressive $15 million today from investors Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital, and Red Hat, as well as existing backers eBay, Inc., Sierra Ventures, and Storm Ventures. The company, which develops a solution to allow developers to build apps for iOS and Android while avoiding difficulties such as fragmentation, said it would use the capital to expand outwards to Europe and Asia. In addition, the fresh funds will be used to help further improve Appcelerator Titanium, the company’s flagship product.
“Appcelerator has become the agent of change for Fortune 500 companies looking to make a strategic move to mobile,” explained Navin Chaddha, managing director, Mayfield Fund. “We see the Appcelerator’s world-class integrated mobile platform as essential to overcoming increasing levels of fragmentation that currently challenge the entire mobile industry.”
This is Appcelerator’s third round of funding, and ironically it comes nearly a year to the day after their Series B round. The company has seen significant growth ever since, pulling in a total of $31.5 million in funding. Today, alongside the funding round, Appcelerator announced that it’s officially the largest mobile development platform for the two most prominent mobile OSs with over 30,000 mobile apps running on 30 million handsets.
The company’s investments in its product represent one of the main explanations behind Titanium’s success. Last week Appcelerator acquired Particle Code to extend its own development platform with HTML5 support and other functions designed specifically for mobile game developers. In September the Appcelerator Open Mobile Marketplace was launched, and now after only four weeks developers can browse over 100 modules.
All this growth can be credited to Appcelerator’s proactive initiatives, as well as partnerships (namely a team-up with Red Hat to power a cloud version of Titanium using the latter’s open PaaS). The Red Hat deal has been in the making for some time, brought to our attention about six months ago when Appcelerator began working with Red Hat’s OpenShift product.
“The interesting tie-in with what we’re doing is that we have an easy-to-use, rapid, cross-platform solution. Red Hat has an easy-to-use, rapid deploy backend solution,” explains Scott Schwarzhoff of Appcelerator. “When you bring that together, you have a one-stop shop for publishing the mobile cloud side for apps.”
Red Hat has been bearish on its investments and acquisitions lately, and especially when it comes to its OpenShift platform. EnterpriseDB is another OpenShift supporter, contributing to the developing open cloud movement. As far as the mobile sector goes, Appcelerator’s ongoing growth and strategic positioning is part of a growing trend towards extending platform services to mobile developers, Millennial Media among those focused on the advertising sector.
Contributors: Maria Deutscher
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