Mobile development framework Appcelerator is announcing a $15 million round of funding today from Red Hat, Translink and Mayfield to continue developing its Titanium integrated development environment. Appcelerator will use the new cash to branch its offerings by adding HTML5 Web app development to its framework, increase its sales staff and fuel international expansion.
Appcelerator’s shift into HTML5 is being propelled by its acquisition of Particle Code a couple of weeks ago. This round of funding will help pay for the Particle Code acquisition. It is an important moment for Appcelerator as it looks to flesh out it robust developer ecosystem and become one of the leading frameworks for the present and future of mobile development.
Appcelerator’s VP of marketing Scoot Schwarzhoff told ReadWriteMobile that the Particle Code team that is now working with existing Appcelerator developers is fitting in very well, working within the existing framework to flesh out Titanium’s eventual HTML5 offerings. Particle Code wrote in ActionScript and Java, which supplements Titanium well. The two companies make a good complement to each other. Appcelerator saw the writing on the wall and realized that it could not marry itself to native app development in the future and to be truly serve its 1.6 million developers, HTML5 would have to be integrated.
Appcelerator now has 30,000 applications in either the Apple App Store or Android Market. That makes them the No. 1 third-party publisher, according to the company’s press release. It created the NBC iPad app that is one of the most downloaded apps over the last several months. In terms of clients, Appcelerator has grown from 100 companies using Titanium to near 1,000. Most of that growth is coming from the enterprise side which shows that businesses and IT departments are looking for flexible frameworks to ease the workload as opposed to using the native tools provided by Apple and Android.
The Appcelerator component marketplace had 103 listings as of the afternoon of Oct. 31, according to Schwarzhoff. Since launching in September it has doubled, with more developers looking to add to the marketplace and make business partnerships with Appcelerator. Schwarzhoff said the company sees three to four requests for partnerships in the market on a daily basis.
In terms of expansion, Appcelerator is looking to have a presence where its developers are. Since acquiring Aptana, Appcelerator’s developer base has grown exponentially. About 40% of its developers are in the U.S., another 40% in Europe with 20% elsewhere, mostly in Asia. Appcelerator will expand to an office in the United Kingdom sometime soon and is closely watching the Asian market for opportunities.
With this latest round, Appcelerator has raised $31.5 million.
