HTML5 WebSocket Developer Kaazing Raises $15M From NEA, Columbus Nova Technology Partners

Kaazing, a provider of live Web and mobile communication and the developer of HTML5 WebSocket, has raised $15 million in funding, bringing the company’s total financing to $39 million. New investors this round include New Enterprise Associates and Columbus Nova Technology Partners, as well as existing investors. Kaazing says it will use the money to drive its plans for corporate growth.

“This influx of new capital will fuel our global expansion and further validates our market momentum with an enterprise-grade web communication platform built using the HTML5 WebSocket standard,” said Kaazing CEO and co-founder Jonas Jacobi in a statement.

“With iPads and other smart mobile devices rapidly displacing PCs and accelerating cloud adoption, enterprise application modernization is increasingly urgent. Today’s static web architectures are expensive and ineffective in supporting this huge market shift – Kaazing’s leading communication products are critical to the emerging cloud and mobile architectures.  We are excited to be investors in the leader in this space,” added NEA partner Rohini Chakravarthy.

The company’s last round of funding was in June, when it raised $17 million. At that time, Kaazing said it would use the funds to fund opportunities for using WebSocket technology to power real-time communications. Last year, Kaazing also brought on Cisco veteran John Donnelly to expand its sales and business development channels.

Based in Mountain View with additional sales offices in New York City and London, Kaazing helps drive the real-time Web and mobile communications of Intel, Google, Bechtel, Oracle, and HSBC. The company was created in 2007 and its founding team helped design the HTML5 WebSocket protocol in order to enable a “full-duplex pipe” between participants, rather than the legacy infrastructure that required a request and response between two users.