Apigee raises $35M in funding from BlackRock

Apigee provides an API platform for customers including Walgreens, eBay and Shell

Apigee, a provider of an API platform for companies, announced Wednesday that it has raised $35 million in new funding.

The round was led by a fund managed by BlackRock with participation from existing investors Bay Partners, Focus Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures, as well as new investor Accenture.

Apigee says that it will use the new financing to grow global sales and marketing, and it also will be used for accelerating the expansion of the Apigee platform.

This new funding round follows the $20 million in funding the company raised in July of last year; that round was led by new investor Focus Ventures, including participation from existing investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. This new round  has brought Apigee's total round of funding to $107 million.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Apigee essentially provides an API platform that can be used by companies to make their services available on multiple mobile devices. On top of the platform, Apigee also provides its customers analytics to measure the activity coming from the apps.

To make it clear what Apigee actually does, let's take the example of what it did for one of its biggest customers, Walgreens.

Walgreens offers a photo-printing service that it wanted to add to make accessible through a mobile device. So the company used Apigee to build an app that runs on the iPhone that allows consumers to upload their photo directly to Walgreens from their phones without having to go onto the Walgreens website first.

Apigee did not build the app but it did provide a layer on top of the Walgreen's infrastructure that enabled Walgreen's engineers to make the website photo-sharing available on mobile devices. For this service, Walgreens then pays an annual subscription, based on a number of metrics, including traffic.

Walgreens now has plans to expand all areas of its business, including pharmacy and the daily shopping experience, to mobile, with Apigee's help.

Apigee offers a number of products to assists its customers, which include eBay, Shell, Live Nation, Bechtel, Marks & Spencer and Vodafone.

Apigee's flagship product is Apigee Enterprise, a platform for creating, managing and measuring digital initiatives built on apps, data and APIs. Apigee also offers Apigee Insights, a big data analytics platform that helps organizations gain new business insights in the app economy and Apigee API Exchange, an API interoperability platform that powers app ecosystems across any industry.

In November of last year, Apigee introduced Mobile Analytics, which lets software developers quickly detect, diagnose and fix problems with their apps running on mobile devices in real time. It helps them avoid costly negative user experiences that are caused by application errors and poor app performance.

Developers are able to monitor and search though mobile application logs, detect application crashes and captures stack traces, determine network performance bottlenecks, push critical configuration fixes in production to reduce bugs and improve performance without the need for code pushes to the app store, and A/B testing of mobile features.

"Mobile changes everything, and every business must have a comprehensive digital strategy that includes reaching customers and expanding through mobile apps," Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, said in a statement.

"Apigee helps companies of all sizes deliver and manage the core elements of a connected mobile world: apps, data and APIs. We are in a market sweet spot, and this additional funding will help us quickly expand our product portfolio and international sales and marketing."

(Image source: https://apigee.com)