NEW YORK, Dec. 6, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AppFirst, the leading provider of SaaS-based application management solutions, announced today it has completed a Series B round of funding with Safeguard Scientifics, totaling $8.7 million. Funding will be primarily focused on expanding sales and marketing to respond to the strong affirmation AppFirst has received from the cloud technology market. This latest investment brings AppFirst's total venture-backed funding to $15 million. As part of the agreement, Safeguard's Managing Director, Technology Philip Moyer will join AppFirst's board of directors.
"AppFirst's continued success in this fast-growing, highly-competitive market has been tremendous," said David Roth, AppFirst CEO. "However, the most critical success factor in taking our business to the next level is scaling both our marketing and sales efforts. Safeguard's significant resources and Phil's expertise in sales, marketing and operations makes this an ideal partnership for AppFirst as we enter this exciting new phase. We are really looking forward to continued growth with Safeguard's expertise and financial resources supporting us."
Moyer brings more than 25 years of experience in the high technology world. He is responsible for deploying capital in, and partnering with, technology companies in financial technology and Enterprise 3.0, including cloud, mobile, SaaS, social, big data, in memory, and the Internet of Things.
AppFirst Growth
In recent months, AppFirst launched strategic growth initiatives in its customer and partner bases, which have generated huge advances for the company. Within the past quarter alone, AppFirst has experienced a 300% increase in traffic to its site and has more than doubled the number of sign-ups and activations. In addition, the company has been recognized by leading industry analyst firm Gartner Group as a "Cool Vendor in APM".
AppFirst launched a partner program earlier this fall for both Cloud and Solution Providers delivering partner-specific subscription offerings, including ongoing training, product support and joint marketing. Also this fall, the company launched its new DevOps Dashboard, an application performance monitoring solution that delivers a clear, unified view of infrastructure, applications and business metrics to all stakeholders in an organization.
"The Application Performance Monitoring market is a $2B+ market that is struggling to keep up with the waves of innovation coming from cloud technologies and agile development shops," said Phil Moyer. "We have been following AppFirst for over 18 months. AppFirst is a solution that simply was not possible before the advent of cloud and big data technologies. Customers, partners, and industry analysts have all echoed the same thing – AppFirst is truly revolutionary. Safeguard and I are excited to have the opportunity to partner with AppFirst at this exciting growth phase in their development."
About Safeguard Scientifics
Founded in 1953 and based in Wayne, PA, Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE) provides growth capital and operational support for entrepreneurial and innovative life sciences and technology companies. Safeguard targets life sciences companies in Molecular and Point-of-Care Diagnostics, Medical Devices, Regenerative Medicine, Specialty Pharmaceuticals and selected healthcare services, and technology companies in Internet / New Media, Financial Services IT, Healthcare IT and selected business services with capital requirements of up to $25 million. Safeguard participates in expansion financings, corporate spin-outs, management buyouts, recapitalizations, industry consolidations and early-stage financings. For more information, please visit our website at www.safeguard.com or our blog (blog.safeguard.com).
About AppFirst
AppFirst is the leading developer of powerful yet simple application monitoring solutions, providing DevOps professionals and Tech Execs full-stack visibility into systems, applications and business metrics. The company's SaaS-based DevOps Dashboard is powered by a flexible big data platform that collects, analyzes and correlates numerous data sources, delivered to a configurable dashboard, allowing users to easily monitor information important to an organization and to quickly troubleshoot problems. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital and Javelin Partners. For more information, visit http://www.appfirst.com. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the AppFirst blog to stay up-to-date on the latest AppFirst news.
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