MuleSoft, the company that helps connect different types of software and services, scored an enormous $128 million investment today.
The Series G round was led by Salesforce Ventures with ServiceNow and Cisco Investments also participating. In addition, it saw some public market institution investment including Adage Capital Management, Brookside Capital and Sands Capital Ventures. Finally, existing investors NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Bay Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler and Sapphire Ventures were also involved.
That’s a lot of investors and a varied bunch at that. Today’s investment brings the total to a whopping $258.5M raised. A raise this big could also be a signal that an IPO isn’t far off.
“We did decide and take investment from some public company institutions because we wanted to develop those relationships and get the motion of working with public market investors,” MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott told TechCrunch.
He also indicated, while they are at the scale to go public, and this could be construed as a step in that direction, he obviously couldn’t say when that would happen. “In Q1, we hit $100M annual run rate in new bookings. We are growing fast and we are at the scale to be a public company. We intend for that to happen and it’s just a question of timing.” For now, he said the company felt it was a good time to raise the private round to continue growing the business.
MuleSoft offers a platform that connects applications, data and devices. That’s a pretty good place to be right now, and it could explain why this wide variety of investors were interested in seeing the company continue to develop.
Schott said that 20 or 30 years ago, companies built monolithic applications, and their jobs were to manage all of that complexity. “All of that has changed now, and everything is broken into pieces. Now the job is to glue all the pieces together from SaaS providers, applications or connected devices,” he said.
He says the reason his company is growing so quickly is there is this enormous need to connect things in rapid fashion and MuleSoft’s platform enables customers to do that quickly. Instead of manually writing code to make these connections, MuleSoft is doing the heavy lifting and making it much easier.
That’s one of the reasons that ServiceNow and Salesforce.com were so interested in investing in MuleSoft because as SaaS companies, they see how important it is for customers to stitch together various services. It’s not enough to have an open API, there needs to be something in the middle like MuleSoft to help pull it all together when multiple services are involved.
“We expose those APIs and connect to them instead of hand-writing code, which reduces cost and expense and speeds up the [development] process,” he said.
