Appcelerator, a Mountain View-based startup that helps businesses create and track the performance of mobile apps, just raised another $12.1 million in a round led by EDB Investments from Singapore. One other new investor was The Social Internet Fund while previous investors like Mayfield Fund, Sierra Ventures, Storm Ventures, Relay Ventures, Translink Capital, eBay, and RedHat also participated.
It brings Appcelerator’s total funding to more than $63 million. The company is one of the very best-known around in helping big brands build consumer-facing apps, and they cater to clients like eBay, Merck, Mitsubishi Electric, ZipCar, PayPal and Ray-Ban.
The company will use that funding to build out a bigger presence in Asia with a new regional headquarters in Singapore that will have its own research and development center and a data center. (Hence, that’s why it makes sense to pick a local Singapore-based investment firm like EDB to lead the round.) The company says it will likely hire around 20 employees there, in addition to the 150 it has already.
They’ll also look at potential acquisitions, as well as scaling up product development, sales and support. The company has grown by about 130 percent year-over-year in sales, and its ecosystem supports more than 480,000 mobile developers and 55,000 apps on 145 million devices. Partners include multinational giants like Germany’s SAP and India’s Wipro.
CEO Jeff Haynie, who is on his third venture-backed startup with Appcelerator, tells me that the company has seen more revenue in the first six months of this year than it did in the previous one.
Appcelerator’s offering has several prongs. They have an open source mobile development environment called Titanium, as well as other products that help with the life cycle of the app so that companies can track how their apps are performing with users and manage them across multiple platforms. Their platform can monitor how applications are actually performing and also support them with a mobile-backend-as-a-service product, like with what YC-backed Parse does as part of Facebook.
Facebook’s recent deal to buy Parse for north of $85 million including retention creates some competition for the company, although Appcelerator’s offering really doesn’t overlap 100 percent with Facebook’s products for mobile developers. (Facebook has more of a focus on distribution through products like app install ads, and then of course, they handle identity management through the social graph.) Appcelerator has cross-platform developer tools, analytics, performance testing, and so on.
“Facebook has a really interesting opportunity, but our business model is much broader than that,” Haynie said. “The Parse deal was very good for us, but maybe not so good for other smaller players in the market.”
Appcelerator also has a massive marketplace of add-ons that enterprise customers can tap into to add different kinds of features and APIs in their apps.