API and Analytics Co. Apigee Closes $60 Million Round As Public Offering Looms

Looking ahead to a potential public offering in the next year the application program interface and analytics services company Apigee has raised an additional $60 million in late stage financing.

APIs are one of the engines driving today’s integrated digital economy, allowing different applications from different companies to work together to provide more value to users. They began in the consumer Internet as a way for programs like Google’s map software to interface with Yelp’s ratings and recommendation service.

As business software has come to look more and more like consumer offerings, users expect the same type of integrated functionality from software that had previously lived in silos. Oracle’s acquisition machine was a vital component of its ability to still offer new products and services to its customers. Now young companies can innovate and integrate new product offerings into big software platforms without being consumed by them.

Apigee essentially manages that process for big companies that aren’t necessarily savvy when it comes to information technology. Lots of companies would like software developers to integrate with their existing software to create new applications, services, or just provide more insight into what customers are doing. Apigee is now the largest standalone service selling that technology to businesses.

In addition, the company now uses its position as a sort of gatekeeper for data flowing in and out of businesses to actually try to extract value from that data in the form of analytics.

Its big competitors Mashery and Layer 7 were both acquired. Mashery by Intel in a roughly $180 million transaction and Layer 7 by CA Technologies for $155 million.

With its latest round, Apigee has surpassed both companies’ valuations with total capital invested coming in at $171 million. The latest financing was led by new investors Pine River Capital Management, a hedge fund, and Wellington Asset Management, a massive mutual fund. Previous investors in the company include the asset manager Blackrock, strategic investors Juniper Networks and Accenture, and venture capital firms Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures.

“Data is a currency now,” says Promod Haque, a senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners and a director on the Apigee board. “It doesn’t matter where it came from or what APIs it came out of,” businesses just want access to information. Apigee is uniquely positioned to sell its customers data offerings in addition to its API management services.

The company has significant traction in enterprises already, and Haque says the next step in its development would be a public offering, which he says could come sometime in the next year.

“At the end of the day we provide enabling technology for digital business,” says Chet Kapoor, Apigee’s chief executive. “We started with api’s but very quickly realized that what was being delivered by APIs was data… [Now] we deliver two core offerings an API platform and a big-data analytics product.”

Apigee solidified its two-pronged approach to the market with the acquisition of InsightsOne, one of four acquisitions the company has made since its launch in 2004.

“We’re creating a platform that brings middleware and analytics together in one world,” Kapoor says.

Photo by Flickr user Dennis Skley.