Xamarin, the company empowering thousands of businesses to rapidly build rich, native iOS, Android and Windows apps, today announced it has raised $12 million in a series A financing from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate. The new funds will be used to expand the company's roadmap of mobile developer tools and to build a sales and marketing team.

Founded less than a year ago by veteran software entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin has experienced explosive demand for its cross-platform mobile development software, bootstrapping the company in less than a year to more than 150,000 developers and more than 7,500 paying customers.

"Our mission is to make it fast, easy and fun to build great mobile apps," said Friedman, CEO of Xamarin. "We've had a tremendous first year, validated by more than 12,000 new developers per month, and millions of dollars in revenue. This funding will enable us to scale our success and better deliver on our mission, bringing millions more developers to mobile."

"Xamarin is in an enviable position," said John Connors, partner with Ignition Partners. "The company's fast, organic growth means its team has hit on a winning formula, and Ignition is happy to further fuel Xamarin's fire."

Xamarin solves key challenges for businesses going mobile

Companies seeking to leverage mobile apps to transform customer relationships and business processes often struggle to find developers skilled in the particular technology architectures of each of today's device platforms. The shortage of these developers is driving up mobile development costs and slowing down app projects. Also, businesses often balk at the cost of maintaining separate, platform-specific code bases.

"Enterprises face a severe shortage of mobile developers as pressures from BYOD escalate and as mobile becomes a strategic customer engagement channel," said Al Hilwa, director of application development software research at International Data Corporation. "Technologies that leverage large existing ecosystems of developer skills are exactly what enterprises need to support multiple device platforms productively."

Xamarin's cross-platform mobile development software allows developers to build mobile native apps with C#, a powerful and modern language used by millions of developers worldwide. With Xamarin, businesses can tap into the existing skills of their developers and unify mobile application development across platforms. Xamarin developers have complete access to all of the native APIs and UI toolkits unique to the iOS, Android and Windows device operating systems, which means they can create truly native user experiences while re-using up to 90 percent of application source code.

Xamarin customers span a wide range of industries and use cases

Internet music provider Rdio is using Xamarin's technology to bring its music service to mobile users. "To our users, the most important thing is the performance and fluidity of the in-app experience. With Xamarin, we are able to have it all. We've saved thousands of engineering hours while delivering gorgeous, high-performance native apps across device platforms and form factors to consumers worldwide," said Todd Berman, Rdio's vice president of engineering.

National Instruments NATI -0.59% , a global provider of software and hardware for engineers and scientists, builds apps on Xamarin's platform to monitor and control machines remotely. "Our customers rely on National Instruments for their mission-critical systems," said David Fuller, vice president of applications and embedded software R&D at National Instruments. "And we, in turn, rely on Xamarin to extend our capabilities to mobile devices. Xamarin's platform helped our NI LabVIEW system design software engineering team to become native mobile developers almost overnight, eliminating the expense of hiring scarce, expensive platform-specific developers."

With the upcoming releases of several modern, connected devices, Microsoft is keenly interested in ensuring its large base of C# developers can quickly make the jump into building mobile apps.

"Xamarin enables our entire developer ecosystem to extend their skills and build apps for all modern device platforms," said Mitra Azizirad, general manager of developer tools marketing and sales at Microsoft. "We are very happy to be working closely with Xamarin to ensure that developers targeting any platform can do so with Visual Studio and C#."

About Xamarin

Xamarin's mission is to make it fast, easy and fun to build amazing, native mobile apps. Xamarin's cross-platform, mobile app development software allows developers to use their existing skills and tooling to build fully native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, while sharing up to 90 percent of source code across device platforms. Indie developers, contract teams and enterprise organizations use Xamarin to accelerate and simplify the creation of high-performance, native consumer and corporate applications. For more information, visit: http://xamarin.com . Follow Xamarin on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, RSS, Twitter and on the Xamarin Blog.