Apigee, the Palo Alto-based company that provides application programming interface (API) support, management and service, today announced a new $20 million round of venture investment, led by Focus Ventures, and including existing investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. For Apigee, which helps power, track and analyze the API calls of plenty of massive companies like AT&T, Netflix and Dell, the fresh injection of cash will help it pursue additional opportunities in overseas markets.
Apigee, which began life as Sonoa Systems back in 2004 and changed its name to Apigee after its API product found plenty of traction following its 2009 introduction, has raised a total of over $72 million in funding overall. It’s used that money to attract huge customers, like the companies mentioned above, as well as MTV Networks, Comcast and IBM. It’s also managed to expand to offices in the U.S., the U.K. and India, but CEO Chet Kapoor says that’s just the start.
“We think the market opportunity is massive,” Kapoor said. “We’re going to use the money for geographical expansion; we have a strong foothold in the U.S., and Europe is one of our fastest growing regions, but we’re going to expand more in the Asia Pacific market as well as Latin American. The second area for using the funding is R&D, so product development.”
On the product side, Apigee recently acquired carrier billing technology, Kapoor notes, to help it pursue more opportunities in specific verticals. In the case of its purchase of Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), Kapoor said the intent was to pursue telecommunications companies specifically. For Apigee, further acquisitions are definitely on the table, he says, should they help the company target additional verticals and fit it with its growth and product strategy.
As development becomes increasingly API-based, and more and more companies feel comfortable not only sharing data internally among their team, but also making it available for others to use externally as additional sources of information to shape and create their own products, the appetite for a way to track, analyze and manage the various API calls products are making should only increase. Apigee clearly wants to be the leader here, which is why it continues to raise funding to add more cash and pursue a strategy of aggressive expansion. There definitely appears to be an arms race on in this space, as only yesterday competitor Mashery raised $10 million in additional VC funding, following a previous $10 million Series D last year.
