AppDirect Raises $35 Million, IBM Acquires Silverpop

Cloud services brokerage company AppDirect raises $35 million to continue its rapid growth in the market, IBM adds to its enterprise marketing portfolio by acquiring Silverpop, and Amazon Web Services launches the next generation of EC2 Memory-optimized instances.

AppDirect raises $35 million. Cloud services brokerage company AppDirect announced that it has raised $35 million in Series C funding led by new investor Mithril Capital Management. Existing investors, including iNovia Capital and Foundry Group, also participated. Mithril is a global investment firm founded by Ajay Royan, with Peter Thiel acting as managing general partner. The funding round will enable the company to continue its rapid, aggressive growth. The AppDirect marketplace and management platform makes it possible for companies of all sizes to find, buy, and manage the technology they need to be competitive. “AppDirect has created a new category of software that makes technology intuitive and easy to use. Thanks to AppDirect, what we used to call the cloud is solidifying into a concrete and useful resource for countless businesses,” said Ajay Royan, co-founder and managing general partner at Mithril Capital Management. “We invested in AppDirect because we think its rapid growth, constant innovation, and foothold in several industries mark the potential for durable growth as well as transformation of the software economy. Our investment will help AppDirect grow its team and service in order to drive its global impact as a major player in the cloud space.”

IBM acquires Silverpop. IBM announced an agreement to acquire marketing cloud provider Silverpop. Atlanta based Silverpop provides cloud-based capabilities that deliver personalized customer engagements in highly scalable environments. Combined with IBM's enterprise marketing portfolio Silverpop's marketing automation and real-time personalization technology will create a complete and advanced customer engagement solution for businesses of all sizes. Silverpop provides deep customer insights and an intuitive engagement engine that will help reduce the complexity of omnichannel marketing, making it easier to personalize the customer experience no matter where the customer sits on their brand journey. “By engineering a solution that uniquely delivers personalization through automation, our team has solved one of the most complex challenges facing marketers today,” said Bill Nussey, CEO, Silverpop. “Combined with the power of IBM’s portfolio and worldwide partner ecosystem, we can advance our mission to help organizations build customer relationships one at a time on an even grander scale.”

AWS launches R3 memory-optimized instances. Amazon Web Services announced the immediate availability of the R3 instance type, the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory-optimized instances. R3 instances are available as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. R3 instances contain the latest Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors, support for enhanced networking, higher sustained memory bandwidth, faster random I/O performance and support for EBS optimization. The instance type is meant for In-memory analytics, high performance databases including relational databases and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and MemcacheD/Redis applications. R3 instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only.