Lucas Carlson, CEO AppFog
AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding, and gives a clue as to where the platform as a service provider is heading. AppFog began as a PHP-focused platform where developers could build and rapidly deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure– a popular market for companies large and small.
The round was led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby (the founder of Xen) and Matt Ocko with previous investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $9.8 million, and AppFog will use the funding to support more and frameworks languages, and to increase the development team working on AppFog, the technology that powers PHP Fog. Lucas Carlson, the company’s CEO said in a release that AppFog would soon support “Node, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, and more.”
AppFog has nearly 20,000 application developers who have created and deployed approximately 10,000 applications using its platform. It’s also had to mature quickly. Since its founding larger companies made big bets in the PaaS space with Salesforce.com buying Ruby platform Heroku, RedHat snapping up Makara and VMware announcing an open source platform supporting multiple languages called Cloud Foundry. Carlson also had to deal with getting hacked by a teenager. As for the AppFog security today, he emailed me to say:
We have worked with a great security firm, Cigital, to do a very deep audit of not only the PHP layer but the entire infrastructure top to bottom. We have created very thick barriers between our customers as well as removing all unnecessary connections between the servers. Also, when the hack happened, we had about 1/10th of the number of users we have now, and many new hack attempts have been tried and failed.
With this funding round, Carlson and AppFog has the means to keep building out a business that’s appealing to developers in a space that appeals to big acquirers. For more on AppFog, check out Carlson launching the company earlier this year at our Structure 2011 conference.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
- Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
- Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
Article source: GigOM http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/fenPtWzA6hI/