Apperian Raises $9.5 Million in New Investment Round

Apperian has raised $9.5 million in a new investment round. The money will help the company fund its developer community, as well as speed up the introduction of application templates and libraries.

Firms taking part in the round are: North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ (KPCB) iFund, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. CommonAngels and LaunchCapital had also given seed money to the company.

The company notes the new investment comes as there is growth in the mobile device sector, and businesses are looking for ways to manage apps that run on mobile devices. In addition, Goldman Sachs projects that two-thirds of CIOs at companies will purchase tablet computers during 2011. Similarly, Deloitte (News - Alert) predicts some 11 million tablet computers will be purchased by enterprises during 2011.

“Enterprise developers need to get in front of the huge demand for rich mobile apps that will allow users to take full advantage of device capabilities to make enterprise data smarter,” David Patrick, Apperian CEO, said in a company statement. 

The new funding also comes as Apperian promotes its Ease platform for the cloud. Ease lets businesses create, deploy, and manage apps for Apple (News - Alert) iOS devices, according to a company press release. Soon, it is expected to also run on the Android (News - Alert) operating system.

“The unprecedented speed of tablet and smartphone adoption in business has opened an enormous opportunity for solutions that make it easy to create, deploy and manage enterprise mobile applications,” Michael Skok, partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, said in the company statement. “Apperian’s deep mobile experience has made it the first company to not only recognize this need, but deliver on it with the EASE enterprise scalable cloud architecture. As a result, the company has already won over major corporations.”

The new money will help the company build its developer community and partnership programs, the company said.

Developers at enterprises can use Ease at no cost to deploy applications on as many as 100 devices, the company said.

Apperian customers include Procter & Gamble, DuPont, AAA, Intuit (News - Alert), The Estee Lauder Companies, Cisco Systems, Talecris Biotherapeutics, and NetApp.

In addition, Patrick said in the company statement that by “partnering with three of the top venture firms in the industry, we will be able to invest in growing our developer community and accelerate the release of our app templates and libraries.”

TMCnet said that Patrick became the company’s CEO last year. He has experience in the software industry and most recently he was CEO of xkoto, an enterprise database virtualization software company, TMCnet said. Prior to xkoto, he was a vice president and general manager at Novell (News - Alert), where he managed the division that included the SUSE Linux and Netware operating systems, collaboration products and several emerging open source technologies, TMCnet adds. Prior to that, he was president and CEO at Ximian, a Linux and open source software company.

In a related matter, Skok and Bob Goodman, a partner in Bessemer Venture Partners’ New York office, will be named to Apperian’s board of directors.