Every business seems to want its own mobile software, and now Pyxis Mobile is transforming to help companies build apps for themselves. Previously, Pyxis created apps for enterprise financial services companies, but today pivots to offer its app development platform directly to clients. The company has rebranded itself as Verivo Software, and taken a $17 million funding round from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, as well as existing investors Ascent Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital.

The new funding will build on the combined $7.15 million secured in Pyxis Mobile’s Series A and B rounds. The money will go towards marketing, product development, recruiting, APIs, and growing its global presence with new offices in Europe and Asia.

Rather than having to work with an outside vendor to issue updates and support, Verivo’s platform will let clients take care of everything in house. Clients can build apps with a drag-and-drop interface, deploy them across device types and operating systems, and manage functionality changes.

The shift from Pyxis Mobile to Verivo has been 16 months in the making, so the platform has already been utilized by several clients beyond financial services. Sales companies like Bunzl have built field operations apps for their employees, Indiana State University offered a campus information app to students, and health tech companies like Healthrageous have used apps to retain customers. Other clients include Allstate Insurance, Halliburton, and Oracle.

Enterprise mobility software demand is booming. Verivo saw license bookings increase by 220 percent and revenue run rate up 50 percent in 2011. By distributing the development power, Verivo can improve its platform in a scalable way instead of fixing the apps of individual clients.

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BestVendor, which aims to create an online resource where business professionals can exchange recommendations for work-related software and services, has raised $3 million in Series A funding.

The financing round was co-led by RRE Ventures and SoftBank Capital, with previous backer Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective’s David Frankel, David Tisch (who heads TechStars NYC), and Old Willow Partners participating.

Founded in January 2011 and based out of New York City, BestVendor says it aims to be for recommendations and reviews of work apps what Amazon is for books and Yelp for restaurants.

The site was launched – in beta, of course – last month and has already attracted more than 4,800 members, who’ve shared 13 work-related applications on average.

In June 2011, BestVendor secured $600,000 in seed funding from SV Angel, Peter Thiel, Lerer Ventures, and SoftBank Capital.

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ServiceMesh, an enterprise cloud platform has raised $15 million in funding from Ignition Partners. Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition, will join the ServiceMesh board of directors. This is ServiceMesh’s first round of institutional funding.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps enterprise customers with self-service provisioning and management of standardized and fully governed infrastructure as a Service, platform as a service and software as a service offerings. The company allows business to go fast, build new applications and manage multiple providers, all in a way that’s compliant.

The Agility Platform enables companies to compress the time-to-delivery for enterprise applications, allowing them to move fast, while governing and securing a company’s most sensitive applications and data across internal and external clouds.

The new funding will be used build additional customer relationships, sales capabilities, and to expand internationally.

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Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised $81 million in Series D funding from strategic investors Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, and prior investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth participating in the round. The new investment brings Box’s total capital raised to $162 million (the $50 million round we reported on a few weeks ago is part of this D round). We’ve heard from sources close to the company that the Box’s valuation was above $600 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. Currently, 100,000 businesses are using Box’s service with 250,000 new users joining each month. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

Josh Stein, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was an early believer of Box back in 2006. He says that two things stood out then that showed that the idea born out of Levie and Smith’s dorm room had potential. First, he explains Smith and Levie had one of the best work ethics he’d seen.

He recalled that when the firm would ask Levie and Smith questions about the product and business, the two fledgling entrepreneurs at the time would respond with thoughtful several page emails at all hours of the day. And second, the quality of the early product, which at that point was aimed at the consumer as well as businesses, was intuitive, well-designed and had a valuable functionality.

So why has Box been able to scale from an idea in a dorm room to a nearly billion dollar business? Stein says that Box’s cloud storage platform is a ‘terrific product’ that meets needs for variety of industries. He says that in the past few years, Box has created a new category in enterprise products of what the company intranet could have become.

NEA partner Kittu Kolluri agrees with Stein that Box has become an extension of the intranet, but adds that Box has also become a next generation extranet, as Box allows companies to share files and communicate with clients outside of the company.

Kolluri also highlights the growing trend of the consumerization of IT. He said that NEA looked at a few other companies in the enterprise storage and collaboration space but Box had the most compelling solution that offered enterprises both security as well as ease of use.

And because of its compelling product, growing revenue and strong user base, the company has even become a pricey acquisition target, receiving acquisition offers of $500 million. Kolluri says it was a smart decision for Box to turn these acquisitions down (NEA invested after these acquisitions were rejected). And Kolluri wholeheartedly believes that Box can and will be a public company.

Stein also believes in Box’s potential strength in the public markets. “Box absolutely should be a public company,” he says and confirms that an offering is in the company’s future plans. Stein says that as an SaaS company, Box’s recurring revenue model makes it an ideal public company. Of course, raising this growth round gives Box the flexibility of when they want to enter the public markets, adds Stein.

Levie hasn’t planned on raising additional funds this year after picking up $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense.

“There’s so much change taking place in the enterprise, and we’re trying to build out go-to platform for how people use data, work, and collaborate,” Levie explains. Part of this is taking on more established enterpruse players like Microsoft. “We’re redefining how enterprises share and manage content on Box, while also building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners and developers to help our customers get more value and flexibility from their information than ever before possible.”

Part of this is creating an ecosystem around the platform. 
In November, Box plans to launch the Box Innovation Network, which will provide funding, consulting and other resources to developers building off of Box. Today, Box integrates with 120 applications, including leading cloud solutions including Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite.

Box plans to use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and to further build out its infrastructure in the U.S., opening a third data center in 2012. 


Of course, with this expansion will come challenges, says Stein. Growing fast can put strain on an organization. Box has rapidly scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees in 2011 to date, including key senior hires from companies such as Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetSuite, and Oracle. Of course these executives has experience with high-growth companies and can help the company innovate while continuing to grow.

As far as strategic partners go, Salesforce and SAP are interesting choices. Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

“Box is helping organizations make better decisions faster by bringing new innovation to business information,” said Jai Das, managing director, SAP Ventures. “As an investor and partner, we’re excited about how Box is reinventing content management and collaboration, and look forward to working with them to make customers more productive.”

In the end, we want no more limits for businesses, says Levie. But he knows that to do this Box needs to innovate fast. “Steve Jobs reminded us of challenges of time,” he explains. “We’re trying to make the best use of our time and do a large amount of things rapidly. The ability to capitalize on this growth in the cloud is dependent on how quickly we can go to market.”

We can definitely expect more products and features coming out of Box in the next few months. And clearly, we could also see a public offering as soon as next year. 2012 should be an interesting year for the cloud storage company.

Checkout our recent video with Levie below.

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San Francisco-based Pantheon opened its doors to the public today after a year building its Web development platform for Drupal sites.  (Drupal is an open-source content management system).  Pantheon is a combination of a Web development tool in the cloud and a Web hosting and management service.  Companies can develop, test, host, and manage their websites on Pantheon  It is all based in the cloud, and the service is free for developers.  Once you make a site go live, it costs $100  a month.

The company raised a $1.3 million seed round a year ago from First Round Capital, Baseline, Floodgate, Founder Collective, and Heroku founders James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry.  You can think of Pantheon as a Heroku for Drupal sites in that it puts the web development environment in the cloud.  Founder and CEo Zack Rosen has  simpler description of what Pantheon offers.  ” You can get an enterprise-complete website for your organization with the level of polish of a consumer-grade site.”

The reason so many corporate and organization websites look out of date is because they are built with expensive, proprietary Web development software that fails to keep up with what is going on in the consumer Web.  Pantheon offers a platform for developing custom sites.  It is built on top of Drupal, which is fast and versatile, but Pantheon makes Drupal development more accessible.  Pantheon makes it easy to deploy different versions of a site on test servers and the live site, as well as backup servers. Some Websites are already running on Pantheon. Customers include the United Nations Global Pulse site, USC Marshall School of Business, and online publisher TheFix.

The unique twist that Pantheon brings to the table is that it is not just a development environment.  Once a site is ready to go live, it runs the site as well.  ”We carry the pager for your website if anything goes down,” says Rosen. It also has done the hard work to optimize Drupal so that every site runs really fast.

Pantheon itself runs on Rackspace Cloud.   Why not Amazon Web Services?  ”Rackspace is much faster at running Drupal than Amazon,” says Rosen.  But the backend is built to make it portable if Pantheon ever decides to move.

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Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

The company says that 200,000+ new users join each month and the average enterprise deployment size doubles every two quarters. Over 1,000 new companies sign up for the business and enterprise editions monthly and Box has seen a 600% growth in mobile deployments in 2011 compared to all of 2010.

CEO Levie tells us in the video below that the future of enterprise software will be personal, social and smart, which means that content will actually connect users and help productivity in the enterprise. help connect users to content, make better decisions, faster, and work more effectively with anyone.

Box raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but Levie says that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense. And the company has even become a pricey acquisition target.

Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

Levie explains that the company didn’t need to raise more money, with the potential acceleration of growth in the cloud, the company wanted to be prepared to mitigate this growth. The new funding will be used to add additional infrastructure, for research and product development and for hiring. There are no current acquisitions on the horizon, but Levie says that the company would certainly be interested in acquiring if there is the right fit.

Check out our video with Levie chatting about the new round below.

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Yammer, an enterprise social network and communications platform, has raised $17 million in new funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participated in the round. Palihapitiya will have an observer’s seat on Yammer’s board of directors. This brings Yammer’s total financing to $57 million.

For background, Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008. But over the past year, the startup has expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.

A year ago, Yammer added number of applications to its platform that increased its functionality beyond just a communications platform, including polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. An activity feed aggregates stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and allows users to follow content. Yammer Connect launched to integrate log-ins into third-party applications and the platform also now supports badges and in-line videos.

And Yammer has grown at a rapid pace. It has been adopted by over 100,000 businesses in 160 countries in less than three years, including employees at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Clients including 7-11, Ford, Southern Company, Shell and SuperValu have deployed Yammer this year.

Palihapitiya said of the investment in Yammer: “Social networking is destined to have as significant an impact on the enterprise as it has already had in our personal lives…Yammer is the clear leader in enterprise social networking and is redefining collaboration, sharing and productivity in a way that will disrupt an entire class of existing enterprise applications.”

Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks says that the company, which raised $25 million last November, didn’t need to raise additional funding at the moment. But the opportunity for Palihapitiya to help advise, scale and provide his insight to the company was “invaluable.”

The new funding will be used to scale operations across its offices in San Francisco, London and Melbourne. The company is hiring employees in sales, engineering and customer support. Palihapitiya isn’t the first Facebook alum to join Yammer. Sean Parker is on Yammer’s Board of Directors, and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel was the first investor in Yammer. And we know the company has ambitions of being the Facebook for the Enterprise.

Yammer faces competition from Jive, Salesforce's Chatter, CubeTree and others.

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The Web-based social performance platform Rypple is now available on the iPhone, the company is announcing today. Like the desktop-sized website, the new mobile application will allow managers to give real-time feedback to staff, provide coaching, track goals and publicly recognize colleagues for doing great work.

The idea behind Rypple, which sees itself as a “Zynga for the enterprise,” is to use social software in the enterprise environment to build a great work culture. It does this by allowing managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application.

The software also employs various game mechanics, like badges, which can be custom-built to reflect a company’s own values. And, as in gaming, employees can rack up “skills earned,” in a method reminiscent of building up a character in a virtual world or MMORPG, for example.

With the new iPhone application, users can track the company feed for news, update teams on the status of a project, post “thanks” and hand out badges.

The app will be available as a freemium offering. There’s a limited free version, a $5 per user per month version that offers access to goals, real-time peer feedback, 0ne-on-one coaching and recognition, and a $9 per user per month version that includes Rypple’s rapid performance review application, Loops, support, rollout and integration into existing company work systems. The app is available here in iTunes now.

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Platfora, a startup focused on bringing businesses intelligence from big data, raised $5.7 million in Series A funding 

led by Andreessen Horowitz with intelligence technology company In-Q-Tel participating. Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board as part of the investment.

Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora, explains that 

Hadoop one of the best options for businesses that manage huge amounts of data because it is low cost and provides a massively scalable data infrastructure. But, he explains that it lacks the interactivity, intelligence and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. Basically, there needs to be a layer that helps retrieve intelligence and analytics from this data.

For background, Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. For example, Facebook uses Hadoop.

Platfora works with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turns these huge amounts of data into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights. The company’s server architecture enables sub-second report delivery, analytics overlay, and drill down performance.

Platfora eliminates the need for traditional data warehouses, ETL tools and the legacy BI products of the past. The company, whose product will go to market in 2012, believes that it can serve a number of companies in industries including web, advertising, finance, telecommunications, logistics and federal intelligence.

Weiss says that Andreessen Horowitz has been sitting on sidelines of making a big investment in Hadoop for some time now. He says that it has been hard to find something valuable to help make Apache Hadoop useful and usable. “This is our big bet on Hadoop, ” says Weiss. Any company that is taking in large amount of data, whether that be from a network, email, or other infrastructure, gaining intelligence from this big data is key.

Weiss also cites the strength Werther as a key factor to the investment. He was a former product head of Greenplum, an analytical database company acquired by EMC.

The venture firm has been generally bullish on big data so the investment in a company that helps make sense of big data isn’t surprising. Andreessen Horowitz led a $25 million round in database company Factual last year.

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Cloud Platform startup Morphlabs has raised $5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by strategic partners BBT of Japan and a private, Indonesia-based investor group. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

MorphLabs offers a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment through the use of open source technologies. The startup offers a server appliance, the mCloud Controller, which helps clients with provisioning, billing and virtual machine management.

The company plans to use the funding to expand to the south east asia region, and will be opening data centers in Indonesia and the Philippines. MorphLabs currently has 10 data center clients.

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