Appirio Announces $60 Million In Series D Funding

This week, cloud services provider Appirio announced the finalization of $60 million in Series D funding led by General Atlantic with additional participation from Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital. The funding allows for continued investment in Appirio’s cloud technology platform marked by its Cloud Enablement Suite, as well as mergers and acquisitions to support its global expansion. Appirio’s Cloud Enablement Suite contains “applications, assets, analytics and crowdsourcing community to power enterprise cloud development.” Appirio’s crowdsourcing platform CloudSpokes matches its customers with a community of more than 35,000 developers interested in working on cloud-related projects.

Appirio has managed installations of cloud applications featuring Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Workday for customers such as Facebook, Twitter, Japan Post and BMC Software. To date, the company has migrated more than 1.5 million users to the cloud. The capital raise follows upon a highly successful year for Appirio in 2011 in which it developed its Cloud Enablement Suite, increased revenue by 80% in comparison with the previous year and acquired SaaSpoint.

Appirio’s capital raise illustrates investor interest in the cloud service provider market. Roughly ten days ago, Cloud Sherpas, a cloud service provider that focuses on Google Apps and Salesforce.com, announced a $20 million funding raise from Columbia Capital as well as the merger with GlobalOne that enables the inclusion of Salesforce applications within its portfolio. Appirio differentiates itself from Cloud Sherpas by embracing a broader portfolio of cloud-based applications. Appirio currently has offices in the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Japan and offers its customers developers through its crowdsourcing platform that are located in more than 65 countries.