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AppDirect installed robots in its San Francisco and Boulder offices so employees in both can personally interact with each other.
When San Francisco-based AppDirect acquired Boulder’s app management company Standing Cloud in September, the cloud service marketplace company had some big expansion plans. Just this month AppDirect announced a funding round just as big as the plans it has: a $35 million Series C round from Mithril, iNovia and Foundry.
This $35 million will help AppDirect to “double down on growth,” co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Saks said, especially with its Boulder team.
“We just opened a new office space in Boulder and we’re looking to expand our local operations,” Saks said. “We currently have a staff of 12, and are expecting to more than double that number."
As they beef up their Colorado team, they will be making the Standing Cloud integration into the AppDirect platform even stronger by making Standing Cloud’s offerings, which help cloud service providers deploy and manage their apps, available to more users. With Standing Cloud’s functionalities, AppDirect is able to stand out as a top cloud marketplace and management solution for the 20 million businesses worldwide that use it such as Staples and Rackspace.
As AppDirect and Standing Cloud’s offerings become more and more integrated, so will their teams. Saks said the company recently even set up some robots in its Boulder and San Francisco offices that the teams can use to personally interact with colleagues in other offices. While AppDirect also has offices in London, Ottawa, Montreal and Munich, it’s the two domestic teams that stand out as having a lot in common.
“San Francisco has a certain type of innovation and creativity that drives growth, but its important to have diversity,” Saks said. “Boulder is another hub that is equally as creative and innovative, and it also shares that fierce loyalty to its local community.”
Having a team on the ground in Boulder will continue to be an assett to AppDirect, helping it to keep a pulse on the important tech innovations coming out of Colorado, Saks said: “We’re seeing larger companies gravitate towards Boulder, such as Twitter’s recent acquisition of Gnip, and we’re seeing everything from tech stars to high-growth startups that go all the way through IPOs, like Rally Software, emerge from Boulder. It’s a very healthy technology ecosystem, and one that should only continue to grow.”
