WAYNE, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE) deployed $12.1 million as part of a $16.0 million Series C financing for Apprenda Inc. Existing investors Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the round. Apprenda will use proceeds to expand its customer growth and build out its product, strategic alliances, sales, client services and marketing functions. Apprenda’s total funding to date is $32 million.
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Clifton Park, NY, Apprenda powers the next generation of enterprise software development in public, private and hybrid clouds. As a hybrid cloud software layer that aligns IT resources and public cloud with efficiency and innovation goals, Apprenda helps customers reinvent their business more profitably, enabling the emergence of the software-defined enterprises. Apprenda’s enterprise Platform as a Service (“PaaS”) has helped existing Global 2000 and mid-market enterprise customers including JP Morgan Chase, Memorial Sloan Kettering and AmerisourceBergen optimize IT and realize new revenue streams through software built on Apprenda’s platform.
“For sixty years, Safeguard has been supporting entrepreneurs and funding innovations that have had a transformative impact on our lives,” said Philip D. Moyer, Managing Director, Technology at Safeguard, who will be joining Apprenda’s board of directors. “We believe that Apprenda is a game changer in the enterprise cloud application market. The company’s platform significantly accelerates the development of cloud applications—legacy and new for private or public clouds—in the same way that commercial application servers accelerated the movement to three tier development. Equally important is that Apprenda scales applications at the work load level, dramatically improving hardware utilization and application management. Apprenda has achieved extraordinary traction with thousands of enterprise applications running in production on their platform. With a great team of co-investors coupled with a strong management team, we are excited to support Apprenda as they expand their leadership in this important new category in enterprise cloud computing.”
Apprenda was recently named by Gartner as an early leader for private cloud enabled application platforms (“CEAP”), a new category with a potential annual market opportunity of up to $4 billion, in Gartner’s “Comparing Cloud Platform Options for .NET Applications.” CEAP provides PaaS functionality as a software product, allowing an enterprise to write to a platform that can be deployed in-house on their servers or externally on another vendor’s cloud. In addition, CEAP decouples the hardware and deployment decision from application development and provides significantly more granular hardware utilization and application management.
“Cloud has caused a major disruption in IT infrastructure creating a new breed of software-defined enterprises that are turning to PaaS to modernize infrastructure and build applications faster, better and more cost-effectively in order to impact the bottom line,” said Sinclair Schuller, co-founder and CEO, Apprenda. “Apprenda has seen massive adoption in the enterprise space with the leading Global 2000 companies using our solution to fuel application development, and we plan to use this round of funding to continue to grow our market share as more companies turn to us for private and hybrid PaaS solutions.”
With this financing, Safeguard acquired a twenty-two percent primary ownership stake in Apprenda and will hold two seats on Apprenda’s board of directors.
About Apprenda
Apprenda is the leading enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) powering the next generation of enterprise software development in public, private and hybrid clouds. As a foundational software layer and application run-time environment, Apprenda abstracts away the complexities of building and delivering modern software applications, enabling enterprises to turn ideas into innovations faster. With Apprenda, enterprises can securely deliver an entire ecosystem of data, services, applications and APIs to both internal and external customers across any infrastructure. From the world’s largest banks like JPMorgan Chase to healthcare organizations including AmerisourceBergen, Apprenda’s clients are part of a new class of software-defined enterprises, disrupting industries and winning with software. For more information, visit Apprenda at www.apprenda.com.
About Safeguard Scientifics
Founded in 1953 and based in the Greater Philadelphia area, Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE) is celebrating 60 years of building market leaders and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. Today, Safeguard provides growth capital and operational support to healthcare and technology companies in medtech, healthtech, specialty pharmaceuticals, financial technology, digital media, and Enterprise 3.0. For more information, please visit our website at www.safeguard.com.
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Forward-Looking Statements
Except for the historical information contained herein, statements in this release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties include, among others, the Company’s ability to make good decisions about the deployment of capital, the fact that our partner companies may vary from period to period, the Company’s substantial capital requirements and the absence of liquidity from our partner company holdings, the Company’s inability to obtain maximum value for our partner company holdings, market valuations in sectors in which our partner companies operate, the Company’s inability to control our partner companies, the need to manage assets to avoid registration under the Investment Company Act of 1940, risks associated with our partner companies, and other uncertainties described in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of these factors are beyond the Company’s ability to predict or control. As a result, past financial performance should not be relied on as an indication of future performance. The Company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or other information in this press release.
