July 21, 2008 : Appirio's Unique Business Model and Proven Track Record Help Businesses Confidently Move to the Cloud
San Mateo, Calif. – July 21, 2008 – Appirio (www.appirio.com), the leader in delivering products and professional services that help businesses accelerate their adoption of on-demand solutions, today announced it has secured Series B financing of $5.6 million. The funding was led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm behind Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal. This round of financing follows a Series A investment earlier this year, which brought in $1.1 million from salesforce.com and angel investors.
Appirio, founded in 2006, has a proven track record of delivering both products and professional services using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies from industry leaders such as Google and salesforce.com. Appirio's service offerings have helped many large enterprises and forward-thinking companies to lower operational costs and improve business agility through on-demand systems that better meet the needs of their business. Appirio also offers a growing product portfolio that "connects the clouds" between Google, Salesforce and Amazon, enabling customers of all sizes to more easily adopt and extend these on-demand solutions within their organization.
"The rapid advancements in web platforms are what makes Appirio's business model so powerful," said Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "Appirio is combining products and professional services so that customers can derive more value from the $300 billion they currently spend to acquire, customize and build business solutions. Appirio has that rare combination of vision and pragmatism that defines leaders who use innovation to disrupt a very large market."
"Sequoia Capital has a reputation for identifying new market categories and the companies that will lead them, and we're excited to have their support as we capture this opportunity," said Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio. "Their investment will allow Appirio to help more companies realize the potential of cloud computing to impact their business."
Proving the Model
In the last year, Appirio has seen revenue grow by more than 400 percent, the team more than quadruple in size, and in less than three months, more than 1500 customers in 80 different countries adopt its products. Appirio's customers now range from Global 1000 companies in telecommunications, high-tech and healthcare, to mid-size companies looking to move entire business processes to the cloud, to sole proprietorships who benefit from Appirio's growing number of product offerings. With the business model proven, Appirio plans to use the additional funding to further invest in service and product offerings that accelerate the shift of the market to on-demand.
Appirio was founded by a team of "reformed" enterprise software executives to address the unique challenges companies face when adopting on-demand solutions. The company was the first to partner with the two leading on-demand platform providers – salesforce.com and Google – offering professional services to help customers quickly, safely and successfully adopt these platforms. Appirio was also the first to develop products that connect and extend Google Apps and Salesforce. These products allow users to easily synchronize calendars and contacts, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find documents or store them in the cloud, and create and share customized CRM dashboards.
"Appirio is an experienced and successful partner that understands how to help large businesses embrace cloud computing," said Dave Girouard, president of Enterprise for Google. "With additional funding, Appirio can more quickly grow to support the increasing demand from businesses looking to benefit from Software-as-a-Service."
About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs," Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
About Appirio
Appirio (www.appirio.com) provides products and services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of on-demand. Appirio has a proven track record of delivering business value to customers by implementing mission-critical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on platforms such as Salesforce and Google Apps, and developing innovative applications that connect and extend today's leading on-demand platforms.
