Capriza Lands A $27M Investment

For all the talk of consumerization in the enterprise, the mission-critical applications powering core operations at most of the world’s largest organizations today remain as unwieldy and complicated as they were 20 years ago. Enter Capriza Inc., which has has just raised $27 million from some of the biggest names in the venture capital community to change that with a cloud service that promises to help organizations bring their legacy software into the mobile-first age faster and cheaper than they could hope to on their own.

Described as “easier than PowerPoint,” Capriza is the brainchild of four former executives from Mercury Interactive Corp., an early provider of application management solutions that sold to Hewlett-Packard Co. for $4.5 billion in 2006. The platform implements a patented personalization technique that observes which parts of a particular application users access over the course of their work and assembles those features into personalized services called “Zapps” that are compatible with a wide range of mobile devices.

For example, a business analyst focusing on operations receives a tailored experience providing only the capabilities he or she needs, while a peer using the same software for accounting would see only financial data and functions. The intent is to eliminate the feature clutter of applications that are intended to be used by everybody.

But that’s just the first part of Capriza’s value proposition. The startup not only promises to help enterprises simplify life for their workers but also to do so at less than one tenth of the cost and a fraction of the time it would take to manually deliver the same functionality. Moreover, its namesake service accomplishes all of that without requiring so much as API access, thereby removing the numerous risks and complicated involved in changing mission-critical applications with one fell stroke.

And to help IT organizations rein in all the different Zapps on employees’ devices, Capriza provides a centralized management console that allows admins to regulate who accesses what and analyze usage patterns to optimize the usefulness of the individual applications. But most significantly, the service automatically extends the governance processes wrapped around the legacy software to mobile clients, sparing customers the hassle of recreating that scaffolding.

That all-round simplicity has landed Capriza big-name accounts likeBrocade Communications Systems Inc., Marvel Worldwide Inc. and DirecTV along with a host of industry awards. And it also drove early backers Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures (CRV) to increase their stake in the startup as part of the newly announced $27 million round, which saw new investors Tenaya Capital. Harmony Partners and Allen & Company chip in too. Capriza plans to invest the funds into scaling product development operations and expand its market reach.

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