Appirio, a technology-enabled services provider that helps enterprises power their business with the cloud, has closed USD60 million in Series D funding led by global growth investor General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.
Appirio plans to use the funds for investment and M&A to support global expansion of its consulting practice areas, as well as to build out the company’s enabling cloud technology and acceleration of its successful crowdsourcing development platform – CloudSpokes.
The financing follows a banner year of growth for Appirio. In 2011 alone, Appirio increased year-over-year revenue by over 80 percent, expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Saaspoint and developed the Cloud Enablement Suite (CES) – an integrated set of applications, assets and development capacity that supports enterprise cloud development. Additionally, the company introduced CloudSpokes – a crowdsourcing community for cloud development that has already attracted 35,000+ developers.
“Appirio is defining what a next-generation technology services provider will be in the era dominated by cloud solutions,” says Gary M Reiner, operating partner, General Atlantic and former CIO, General Electric. “The company’s unique combination of technology and crowdsourcing – along with their cloud focus and experienced team – have the potential to completely disrupt the $793 billion worldwide Global Systems Integrator market.”
Brett B Rochkind (pictured), managing director, General Atlantic, says: “Our experience in helping cloud companies become global leaders led us to observe and admire what Appirio has done during the last several years. We look forward to partnering with the management team to scale their success and make Appirio the pre-eminent cloud solutions provider to the world’s largest and fastest growing companies.”
Since the company was established in 2006, Appirio has worked on some of salesforce.com, Google and Workday’s largest, most complex, global customers, including those at BMC Software, Japan Post, Medtronic, Flextronics, Twitter, Merkle and NetApp. The Appirio team has moved more than 1.5 million users to the public cloud to date and has offices in the US, Japan, Singapore and the UK with crowd-sourced developers in 65+ countries.
"Enterprises are demanding to work with a trusted, agile cloud advisor and we fill that role,” says Chris Barbin, CEO, Appirio. “Just as legacy software providers have struggled to add cloud to their legacy businesses, the global system integrators, including Accenture and Deloitte, will be challenged to overcome their on-premise dependency and adapt to the rapidly changing market and customer demands related to the cloud.”
“Twitter is redefining an industry and wants to work with service providers that are agile enough to evolve and define our business processes,” says Adam Bain, president of global revenue, Twitter. “Appirio has become a trusted adviser and partner, helping us scale our operations and execute solutions as quickly as we can think of them.”
