Apperian closes $9.5M round

The enterprise app management company gets support from North Bridge, Bessemer, iFund, and more

Productivity app management company Apperian on Tuesday announced the close of a $9.5 million round of funding led by some pretty heavy hitters: North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ (KPCB) iFund, CommonAngels, and LaunchCapital. CommonAngels and LaunchCapital also contributed to Apperian's seed round. The new funds bring Apperian's total raised to $11 million. 

Launched in 2009, Apperian bills itself as a "mobile application management company" that focuses on productivity apps for the enterprise. Using the company's EASE platform (the Enterprise App Services Environment), businesses can access all of Apperian's enterprise services, including app libraries and cloud services to create, deploy, and manage multi-platform mobile apps. 

Some of the mobile enterprise apps being built on Apperian's platform today include ordering and tracking apps, PO approval apps for urgent orders with one-click approvals, retail stock apps, HR apps that include timesheets and expense reports, corporate directories, hospital patient monitoring apps, and more. And the company counts some big names among its clientele:  Procter & Gamble, Dupont, AAA, Intuit, The Estee Lauder Companies, Cisco Systems, Talecris Biotherapeutics, NetApp, and more. 

But while the company started with smartphones in mind, it now has its eye on tablets, noting that  a recent Goldman Sachs survey shows two-thirds of CIOs will adopt tablet computers in 2011. Additionally, an estimated 11 million tablets will be bought by enterprises this year. 

“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. 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,” said Apperian CEO David Patrick, in the company's announcement.

In addition to the latest round of funds, Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners and Bob Goodman of Bessemer Venture Partners will be joining Apperian's board of directors. 

“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,” said Skok in a prepared 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."

The company plans to use the new funds to boost development of the EASE platform, ramp up development of app templates and extensions to the EASE SDK, and pump up sales and marketing.

Image source: Apperian.com