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Appcelerator Closes on $15M

2011-11-01
Platform for building mobile web applications announced that it raised $15 Million in its third round of funding led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital, and Red Hat. Existing investors eBay, Sierra Ventures, and Storm Ventures also participated in the round.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Appcelerator, the leading integrated mobile platform for rapidly developing native and HTML5 mobile web applications using open web technologies, today announced that is has raised $15 Million in its third round of funding led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital, and Red Hat. Existing investors eBay Inc., Sierra Ventures, and Storm Ventures also participated in the round.

Proceeds will fund expansion into Europe and Asia as well as continued investments in the company's flagship mobile development platform, Appcelerator Titanium. The company also announced today that it is now the largest mobile development platform in the Apple and Android marketplaces with over 30,000 mobile apps on 30 million devices in its portfolio.

"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."

"The alliance of Appcelerator's leading mobile platform with Red Hat's leading platform-as-a-service lets developers create an exciting world of mobile applications that engage users and scale seamlessly," added Issac Roth, PaaS Master, Red Hat. "We are working to make the experience using these two products together an easy-to-use and powerful one for companies of any size."

A Year of Explosive Growth
Since Appcelerator's last round funding in October 2010, the company has been on a rapid growth trajectory. In 12 months, Appcelerator has progressed by an order of magnitude in every area:

- Developers: including its acquisition of Aptana in January, Appcelerator now counts 1.6 million developers in its ecosystem.

- Apps: Appcelerator is now the largest 3rd-party publisher of mobile applications in both the Apple and Android marketplaces with more than 30,000 mobile applications published to date, a 6-fold increase over 2010.

- Mobile Devices: Titanium-powered applications are now on over 30 million unique devices, a 12-fold increase over last year.

- Customers: Appcelerator has signed 1,000 new customers in the past year, a 10-fold increase. Notable additions with production applications developed on Titanium include NBC, eBay, Medtronic, Zipcar, GameStop, Merck, Progressive, Reuters, and Harrah's.

- Marquee apps: Appcelerator applications have been in the top 10 in almost every major category. NBC iPad hit #1 in the Apple App Store in September, Wunderlist and GetGlue each have over 1 million downloads, and Hotel Tonight and Trip Lingo have seen major success in the travel category.

- Marketplace: since launching its add-on marketplace last month, Appcelerator's Open Mobile Marketplace has doubled the number modules to 100 in four weeks. Almost every new module has been built externally by third-party ISVs, including new modules for Parse, CouchDB, and PunchTab.

- Employees: to support its rapid growth, Appcelerator has grown from 17 employees to 100 in 12 months.

- Acquisitions: Appcelerator acquired Aptana in January to create a world-class mobile IDE, followed by the DEMO God-winning mobile platform company Particle Code last month.

- Industry recognition and leadership: Appcelerator was recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's MCAP Magic Quadrant earlier this year and continues to jointly author thought-leadership mobile industry research with IDC. The company is also listed as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2011, ranked in the top 5 platforms that defined the mobile space in 2010 by Mashable, awarded best developer tool by the Eclipse Foundation, and an OnMobile top 100 private company. Appcelerator was also a recent keynote presenter at Sierra Ventures' Annual CIO Summit.

Looking Forward: Appcelerator Invests in its Titanium Platform and Global Expansion
Appcelerator plans to use its new funding to strengthen and expand its core Titanium product line. Last week, the company announced it acquired Particle Code to add HTML5 mobile web and gaming capabilities to the platform and additional investments are planned for both consumer and enterprise application development.

With over half of its demand coming from Europe and Asia, Appcelerator plans to open a UK office in Q1, and is working with Translink to enter Japan, Korea, and Greater China.

"The international demand for Appcelerator's products is enormous," described Toshiya Otani, managing director, TransLink Capital. "Android and iOS are surging in Asian markets and there's a need by large OEMs, Systems Integrators, and multi-nationals in Asia to align themselves strategically with Appcelerator. We are actively working with Appcelerator to secure major international strategic partnerships that have a global footprint."

Including its earlier Series A and B rounds, Appcelerator has raised $31.5 million.

About Appcelerator
Appcelerator is the leading enterprise-grade, cross-platform development solution on the market today, with over 1.6 million developers using its software to power over 30,000 cloud-connected mobile, desktop, and web applications used on 30 million devices every day. The company's flagship offering, Appcelerator Titanium, is the only mobile cloud platform to enable fully native, cross-platform mobile app and HTML5 web development, from a single codebase. Appcelerator's customers can leverage their existing skills and open, industry standard technologies to decrease time-to-market and development costs, increase customer adoption and revenues, and enjoy greater flexibility and control.
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