The explosion of public APIs over the past few years has created a new market for companies that can help manage APIs and integration of data and applications. One of the companies leading the charge to make integration seamless is MuleSoft, a startup that has just raised $37 million in its fifth round of funding.

MuleSoft offers an extensive platform for companies who seek to integrate APIs and data from other companies. For example, many business-to-business companies want to integrate Salesforce’s data into their apps because there is a lot of crossover with their customers. MuleSoft has 400 paying customers, including Honeywell, MasterCard, Nestle, Nokia, and Walmart.

“The integration platform is huge, and we’re going after a massive market,” MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott told VentureBeat. “Many legacy vendors don’t move at the speed that you need to today, but we do.”

The new funding will go toward expanding its lineup of products and hiring many more sales and support people to help spread the word on what MuleSoft’s platform can do. Schott said the new cash will also help it acquire smaller companies as it continues to expand.

On top of the funding, it has also launched what it dubs the “Anytime Platform,” a full-service integration service to make it possible to connect any app, data service, or API to another whether it is in the cloud or on-premise.

Many times companies seeking late-stage funding like this aim for IPOs in the near future. MuleSoft is no exception. Schott said the company intends to go public in the “next 12 to 18 months.”

“It makes a lot of sense for us to go public eventually,” Schott said.

The new funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation by other investors, including Salesforce, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Bay Partners. Including the new round, MuleSoft has raised $81 million to date.

“The success of companies like Salesforce.com and Workday shows the profound economic advantage of the cloud-based approach, but the move to the cloud creates a new set of challenges for enterprises,” Scott Sandell, general partner at NEA, said in a statement. “Companies that are enabling a more seamless transition from on-premise to cloud are among the most exciting investment opportunities right now, and MuleSoft is one of the breakout leaders in this category.”

San Francisco-based MuleSoft was founded in 2006 and has 180 employees. Schott said the company will have “close to 300 employees” by the end of 2013.

Young people holding hands via William Perugini/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ben Kepes is a content adviser for the CloudBeat 2012 conference.

My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource constrained small businesses that lack the cash and IT skills of enterprise.

As we move into the cloud-dominated world, the issue of integration is made more prominent as enterprises realize just how many different systems are being used throughout their organizations. While one of the best things about cloud is the widespread democratization of technology, this is also one of the most problematic areas. All of a sudden, managers and IT staff are scratching their heads about how to reconcile the issues created by business units having to interact with many software solutions from a ton of different vendors.

It’s for this reason that when Paul Miller and I started talking about content for the upcoming CloudBeat conference, that integration and the cloud was one of the areas we wanted to focus on. But my take on integration is even wider than simply “stitching together a few different solutions”.

True application integration, in its purest sense, is one angle that needs to be seriously analyzed. There are many companies trying to solve this conundrum — from working out how to integrate the data and processes of businesses using both QuickBooks and Salesforce to pre-packaging “bundles” of software for specific verticals and selling them as a package. Companies like SnapLogic, Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, and others are trying to work on this problem set.

But there are other areas that integration come into play — services like Tibco’s Tibbr and Salesforce’s Chatter are attempting to build a social fabric across an organization that, at least with a broader definition, constitutes a sort of integration. They bring together discrete sets of data and workflow and try and deliver sense out of them all.

Other solutions like WalkMe aim to resolve the cognitive dissonance that comes from too much exposure to too many different solutions. WalkMe has taken the approach of enabling online self-service to overcome some of what integration aims to solve — the user experience problems caused by discrete packets of software.

And then there is a further discussion to be had, that of whether lightweight integrations, a sort of “minimum viable product” approach to software integration, is sufficient in this loosely couple modern world or whether the traditional enterprise approach with big and heavy integration solutions, data warehousing and ETL is still required — does the proliferation of APIs solve this issue?

I’m looking forward to moderating an integration session at CloudBeat where I’ll be talking with panelists including SnapLogic CTO Chris Wagner and Informatica SVP Juan Carlos Soto. The overarching theme for the integration track is to explore the real need for consistent workflows, integration tools, common data formats, and other solutions to help tie a multitude of disparate systems together.

In my session, we’ll be focusing strongly on lightweight cloud integration versus enterprise-grade and asking whether companies really need all the bells and whistles that come with traditional integration solutions, like ESBs, ETL, or EAI tools. Or are today’s exponentially growing library of APIs, paired with more affordable SaaS-based integration tools, enough to get the job done well?

It’s going to be a fun and informative session — why don’t you join us?

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, investor, commentator, and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity, and agility, all enabled by the cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. You can follow Ben on Twitter.

System integration concept image via alphaspirit/Shutterstock

I’ve emailed SnapLogic’s public relations team for confirmation and details and will update if I hear back. The company previously raised $4.8 million in funding from a number of high-profile investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (run by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz), “super angel” firm Floodgate (previously known as Maples Investments), and Epinions co-founder Naval Ravikant. The filing doesn’t list any new board members, so it’s hard to speculate about who led the new round.

SnapLogic says it’s “transforming the integration market with its innovative, open, and extensible DataFlow architecture and straightforward subscription model.” Basically, it offers a way for businesses to pull data from a variety of online sources — for example, customers could take data from sales tool SugarCRM and turn it into an RSS feed that salespeople can read on their phones.

The San Mateo, Calif. company recently opened an app store for third-party applications.