Kinvey, the 2011 TechStars Boston startup that pioneered the Backend as a Service category, has closed $5 million in a new Series-A round of financing, led by Avalon Ventures, with Atlas Venture following on. Kinvey previously raised a $2 million Seed round in August last year.

The company also released its Backend as a Service (BaaS) platform out of beta today. Kinvey's platform helps developers easily and quickly build compelling, data-driven, and feature-rich mobile and web apps, without having to setup, code or operate a backend. Developers just use Kinvey's iOS, Android and JavaScript libraries to get access to a RESTful app data store, a CDN-enabled large file store, push notifications, geo-queries with 3rd-party points-of-interest data, mobile analytics, easy backend versioning, user management, and data-level privacy and security access controls.

Apart from its core backend features, Kinvey is solving a very important challenge that no other BaaS or PaaS provider is tackling - the ability to provide unified access to any backend data or feature through its client libraries. "Other cloud platforms lock developers in with only the features they provide. If you want any other feature or data, you're on your own. That's wrong," said Sravish Sridhar, Founder and CEO of Kinvey. "We want to free features and data from any source and make it available to applications in a unified fashion, by addressing the complexity ourselves. Developers can then focus on creating magic with Kinvey services, cloud APIs and legacy data, to deliver fantastic experiences to their users."

With its Service Link architecture, Kinvey is the only Backend as a Service platform that allows developers to easily connect to any third-party cloud service of their choice, like Google Places, Facebook, foursquare and Urban Airship. Mobile development companies and enterprises can also use Kinvey Service Links and libraries to unlock data stuck behind firewalls and silos of legacy backends like Oracle, WebSphere, JBoss and SAP, saving them months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs.

Today's funding and launch news follows a series of recent integration announcements, including Adobe (PhoneGap), Appcelerator, HP, Urban Airship and VMware (Cloud Foundry). Developers building apps that connect to Kinvey can use any mobile SDK to build their front-end and PaaS vendor to host business logic and custom websites.

"I've seen Kinvey make massive strides in their business this past year. They've given rise to the Backend as a Service category and stayed a step ahead of everyone else," says Brady Bohrmann of Avalon Ventures. "Their innovation doesn't end with their technology. They are even disrupting cloud pricing models with their new Success Pricing, where the thousands of developers using Kinvey pay based on the number of active users they have per app. I can't wait to see how they'll grow this space next."

The company plans to use the funding to grow its team in Cambridge, build more Kinvey Service Links to cloud services and legacy backends, and grow customer adoption through Kinvey's public and private cloud deployments.

About Kinvey
Kinvey is the leading Backend-as-a-Service platform that makes it ridiculously easy for developers to setup and operate a cloud backend for their mobile, tablet and web apps. With Kinvey's Backend as a Service, developers get a full-featured data store, along with mobile specific features like location, social, and push, and connectivity to any third-party cloud service or legacy backend. All of these backend features are easily consumed by iOS, Android, JavaScript, and Node.js libraries so that our developers don't have to write any backend code. Kinvey will auto-scale and maintain your backend, so you can put your time and money into building more valuable apps. Kinvey is based in Cambridge, MA. Learn more at www.kinvey.com.