Appirio Raises $35 Million, Hires Product Veteran From Amazon as CTO to Build Services Platform

SAN FRANCISCO, April 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Appirio, a global cloud services company, today announced that it has secured $35 million in a Series E funding round, led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. The company has also hired Alex Castro as its new Chief Technology Officer. The new funds will be used to further global expansion of Appirio's cloud and enterprise crowdsourcing services, and intensify investment in the Appirio Services Platform.

Prior to Appirio, Alex Castro was Vice President of Product for Electronic Art's cloud-based data and analytics platform. He also served as a member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team where he led the effort to launch Amazon's crowdsourced marketplace, Mechanical Turk. He was a founding member of Microsoft's CRM team, and CEO and founder of Delve Networks, a cloud online video platform provider. Alex's new role at Appirio focuses on building a next generation services platform that will enable partners and customers to have direct, on-demand access to Appirio's cloud expertise, pre-built solution accelerators and the company's global community of designers, developers and data scientists.

"We are excited to have Fidelity as an investor and Alex on board to help take our vision and differentiation to the next level," said Chris Barbin, CEO, Appirio. "Traditional consulting models have not evolved much in the last 20 years. They've become unnecessarily complex and have not kept pace with today's cloud economy. Appirio offers a fundamentally different approach to solving business problems. This new funding validates our leadership position and our track record in the market."

According to Gartner, within the next three years over 75 percent of high-performing enterprises will be using some type of crowdsourcing for business process services. Combined with a steady increase in adoption of public cloud services solutions, crowdsourcing is on its way to drastically and permanently transform traditional information technology infrastructures. Appirio aims to help companies solve business and technology problems in new and compelling ways by combining conventional practices with the new concept of "utility services."

Founded in 2006, Appirio has offices in five countries - the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan and India - with a workforce of nearly 1,200 employees. The company has become a top partner to the leading cloud pioneers, moved more than four million users to the public cloud, and built a thriving community of more than 750,000 of the world's top developers, designers and data scientists.

For more information on relevant Appirio news, please read:

• Making topcoder the premier destination for crowdsourced design, development and analytics, Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio
• We've Expanded in Dublin!, Tim Medforth, Appirio International SVP

About Appirio
Appirio is a global services company that helps customers innovate and win in the new cloud economy.  As the leader in enterprise crowdsourcing, we deliver unmatched customer value by combining the world's top talent with a unique cloud services platform. Our platform harnesses the power of one of the world's largest crowdsourcing communities, thousands of ready to deploy assets, and leading cloud, industry and technical experts, to help our customers drive competitive advantage. Appirio is a trusted partner to some of the world's largest brands, including Cardinal Health, Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Georgia-Pacific, Home Depot, Moen, and Sony Playstation.

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SOURCE Appirio

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