Xamarin, the world's fastest-growing mobile application development platform, today announced a $54 million Series C financing round- the largest single round raised by any mobile application platform company- led by new and existing investors, including Charles River Ventures, Floodgate, Ignition Partners, Insight Venture Partners, and Lead Edge Capital. The company has now raised a total of $82 million in three rounds of funding. Xamarin will use the new funding to expand its mobile app development platform and cloud services to solve problems for all mobile developers throughout the app lifecycle, and to expand sales and marketing teams globally.

The funding is driven by Xamarin's substantial business momentum in just three years - building a community of more than 700,000 developers, and with customers now in more than 150 countries. Xamarin enables developers to design, build, integrate and test mobile apps, and delivers comprehensive online mobile training through Xamarin University.

As consumers and employees increasingly rely on mobile devices for day-to-day tasks, there is growing demand from businesses to create rich native mobile applications. According to IDC, the mobile enterprise application development platform market will grow from $938.5 million in 2012 to $4.8 billion in 2017. To address this surging demand, businesses need a mobile application development platform that makes it easy to deliver world-class mobile experiences to employees and customers around the world, on a plethora of mobile devices.

Xamarin has the only mobile application development platform that produces fully native iOS and Android apps using a single, shared C# code base, a language used by six million developers worldwide- bridging one of the largest developer bases in the world to the most successful mobile device platforms. This means businesses are able to leverage their existing teams and re-use tools and code for mobile development, vastly accelerating consumer and enterprise mobile strategies.

'Mobile is an increasingly strategic channel for us to engage with our readers,' said Ian Rosen, Vice President and General Manager, MarketWatch and SmartMoney at Dow Jones. 'Xamarin made it possible for our team to build an app much more quickly than we otherwise could have.'

The company has also been quick to support emerging platforms as quickly as they are announced. Xamarin was the first mobile application development platform to support Android Wear, Google Glass, Amazon FireOS and FireTV.

Growth of Business and Community

In the last year, Xamarin continued its strong momentum in the enterprise market. The company was recognized by Gartner as a visionary in the 2013 Magic Quadrant report for Mobile Application Development Platforms.

Xamarin has more than 200 consulting partners across the globe building apps for businesses including global system integrators, regional consultancies, and digital agencies. The company also announced major industry partnerships including:

Microsoft to make it faster and easier for joint customers to go mobile

Salesforce.com to easily connect Xamarin apps to salesforce.com data

Samsung to help enterprises deliver secure apps

SAP to better integrate SAP mobile solutions and back-end data sources

Xamarin has also created the largest cross-platform mobile development event in the world, Xamarin Evolve 2014. In its second year, the Evolve conference will host more than a thousand mobile developers participating in more than 90 training and conference sessions in Atlanta, GA, October 6-10. Speakers from Facebook, Github, Microsoft and other leading companies will cover mobile development best practices in UI design, app architecture, mobile testing, app distribution, security, analytics, monetization and more.

'Thousands of companies trust Xamarin with their mission-critical employee, business, and consumer apps as they seek to transform customer relationships and business processes through mobile,' said Nat Friedman, Xamarin CEO and co-founder. 'This funding enables us to aggressively expand our product portfolio and Xamarin's market presence around the world, making Xamarin the best choice for building great apps everywhere.'

About Xamarin

Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development. No other platform enables businesses to reach 2.6 billion iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows devices with fully native apps from a single, shared code base. Xamarin is used by more than 100 Fortune 500 companies to accelerate the creation of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps. Xamarin's global customer base in 150 countries includes Dow Jones, Bosch, McKesson, Halliburton, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cognizant, GitHub, Rdio, and WebMD. Xamarin is a Visionary in Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant report for Mobile Application Development Platforms. For more information, please visit: xamarin.com or follow us @xamarinhq.