Wheelings & Dealings: Apprity Raises $8M from Investors

Apprity has raised $8 million in its first funding round. Taking part in the financing were Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, and Gaurav Garg, a founding partner of Wing Ventures.

The new money will be used to hire more employees for the security firm’s engineering as well as research and development staff. “Close to 98 percent of our projected spend is in core engineering and research,” Apprity CEO Rohit Gupta told TechCrunch.

The involvement of Haque and Garg at Apprity is noteworthy, too, given their past accomplishments in tech investments. More than 20 of Haque’s portfolio companies had IPOs and some 36 were acquired. In 2004, he was named by Forbes as the top venture capitalist based on performance. Garg is on the board of Ruckus Wireless, FireEye, MobileIron, Jasper, Shape Security, Instart Logic and Cohesity, and was a partner at Sequoia Capital (News - Alert) between 2001 and 2010.

When it comes to Apprity, Gupta helped to found the security company with Ganesh Kirti, now chief technology officer. Both had worked at Oracle (News - Alert), where Kirti was senior director, Engineering, Identity Management & Security products division, and Gupta was vice president of Product Management for Identity and Access Management.

“With the many years of experience that these gentlemen have, it gives them a very interesting vantage point to assess the weaknesses of other systems and build something different,” Haque was quoted by TechCrunch.

It is still not clear what specific products Apprity will likely sell, though it is believed they relate to security and the cloud. The cloud market is expected to see significant increases this year. Recently, IDC (News - Alert) predicted cloud spending, including cloud services and related technology, will jump 25 percent in 2014, reaching over $100 billion. There is also going to be an increased number of data centers, IDC said.