Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE), a holding company that provides growth capital and operational support to life sciences and technology companies, today announced that it deployed $6.5 million of an $8.7 million Series B financing for AppFirst, Inc., a New York, NY-based company that provides cloud-based application performance monitoring (APM) solutions for the enterprise. FirstMark Capital and Javelin Venture Partners also participated in the round. Proceeds from the funding will be focused primarily on expanding sales and marketing and accelerating platform enhancements.

AppFirst is an APM solution that provides unprecedented visibility into critical, top-line business metrics. Through its SaaS-based DevOps Dashboard, AppFirst captures the most detailed information ever collected from an entire application stack, including millions of infrastructure, application and business metrics, aggregates them and then correlates them in a single, big data repository that eliminates the need for users to search for data in multiple places. Data is collected continuously to provide customers with visibility into their entire infrastructure and every application running in production, delivering actionable data and bringing overall system management to a whole new level of efficiency.

"There are rapidly evolving waves of new technologies impacting the enterprise, including mobile, cloud, big data, social and M2M," said Philip D. Moyer, Managing Director, Technology at Safeguard, who joined AppFirst's Board of Directors. "In particular, there is a dramatic shift towards cloud-based infrastructure and agile development methodologies that has increased the pace of release of new application code by 3x-5x. The traditional tools that make up the $2 billion APM market are only affordable to 5% of the applications in production and they simply weren't designed for the cloud or this new pace of development. AppFirst represents the next generation of APM. Its patent-pending, miss-nothing, always-on monitoring installs in minutes and generates incredible cloud-based proactive monitoring with less than 1% overhead on an application. AppFirst's model makes performance monitoring available, affordable, and effective for 100% of the cloud-based application development market. We are excited to partner with AppFirst at this exciting time during the company's growth."

"AppFirst's continued success in this fast-growing, highly-competitive market has been tremendous," said David Roth, CEO and co-founder of AppFirst. "However, the most critical success factor to taking our business to the next level is scaling both our marketing and sales efforts-and that requires capital. We are excited about bringing Safeguard on board, especially since many members of the team have been entrepreneurs and operators themselves and, as a result, understand the challenges growing companies face. In particular, Phil's expertise as a CEO, entrepreneur, investor, software developer and operator make him an ideal board member as we progress to this next phase of growth and commercialization."

About Safeguard Scientifics

Founded in 1953 and based in Wayne, PA, Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE) provides growth capital and operational support to entrepreneurial and innovative life sciences and technology companies. Safeguard targets life sciences companies in Molecular and Point-of-Care Diagnostics, Medical Devices, Regenerative Medicine, Specialty Pharmaceuticals and selected healthcare services, and technology companies in Internet / New Media, Financial Services IT, Healthcare IT and selected business services with capital requirements of up to $25 million. Safeguard participates in expansion financings, corporate spin-outs, management buyouts, recapitalizations, industry consolidations and early-stage financings. For more information, please visit our website at www.safeguard.com, visit our blog at blog.safeguard.com, or follow us on Twitter (twitter.safeguard.com), SlideShare (slideshare.safeguard.com), LinkedIn (linkedin.safeguard.com) and StockTwits (stocktwits.safeguard.com).

About AppFirst

AppFirst is the leading developer of powerful yet simple application monitoring solutions, providing DevOps professionals and Tech Execs full-stack visibility into systems, applications and business metrics. The company's SaaS-based DevOps Dashboard is powered by a flexible big data platform that collects, analyzes and correlates numerous data sources, which are delivered to a configurable dashboard that allows users to easily monitor information important to an organization and to quickly troubleshoot problems. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture-backed by FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE). For more information, visit www.appfirst.com, Follow Us on Twitter or subscribe to the AppFirst blog to stay up-to-date on the latest AppFirst news.