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

Salesforce-owned productivity app Do.com has partnered with big-name services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Harvest to improve its offerings and build an even-better app to help teams accomplish tasks.

“A lot of our customers don’t have a dedicated IT person,” Do cofounder Amit Kulkarni told VentureBeat. “These are small groups without a lot of resources. We want to make this easier for them.”

Do offers a productivity service for small and medium-sized businesses, with tools such as task management, project tracking, note-taking, and contact sheets. Known as Manymoon before Salesforce bought it, Do launched in November 2011 and has since attracted 100,000 customers and offers apps for iOS, Android, and the web.

Now the service will go further to help existing customers and to attract new ones. Integrating the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Harvest adds way more functionality to Do. It smartly labels its initiative to add new apps to its stable as “Do More.”

“The main reason we’re doing these specific integrations is because these are the apps our customers have been asking for,” Kulkarni said. “Our customers tell us they use a lot of different data sources.”

Here are the apps that now work with Do.com:

• Dropbox and Google Drive: You can now attach Dropbox and Drive files to tasks, and with one click, you can send files to your customers from inside Do.
• Harvest: This ideally will make your time-tracking less painful. Just click on the stopwatch on a specific Do task to log hours for a customer.
• Wufoo: You use this to engage with prospects and customers using online forms. You can set it up so that when a form is filled out and submitted, it automatically attaches itself to a task.
• Contactually: It automatically creates Do contacts for people and prospects you want to interact with via email.
• Desk.com: The Desk.com app from Salesforce helps you handle customer service issues quickly and collaboratively, so now your help desk can be assigned Desk issues as Do tasks.
• Salesforce.com: Track sales and opportunities from your Salesforce data with Do.
• Fancy Hands: Acts as a personal assistant inside Do. (This is being tested now and will be fully added at a later date.

Check out the slides below for a better look at how these integrations look inside Do:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud storage business Box has announced a new HTML5 embeddable framework called “Box Embed” so more people can access Box’s service through other applications, the company said today.

Box helps businesses with their cloud storage and collaboration needs. It faces stiff competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Egnyte, and more, but it has still attracted more than 14 million users across 140,000 businesses. Box CEO Aaron Levie (pictured, left) has espoused the benefits of cloud storage and integrations for several years, and now Box Embed will help it potentially attract even more customers.

Box VP of Platform Chris Yeh said in a blog post:

Box Embed is a new HTML5-based framework available today that makes it easy to embed the entire Box experience anywhere people work. Just grab a quick embed code from the sharing options to the right of any file or folder on Box, add to your website, forum or blog, and voila! – instant access to all the Box features you love, like uploads, search, comments, sharing, tagging coworkers and Box Edit for quick file edits. It even uses shared link permissions, so you can add or restrict collaborators on your content directly within Box Embed (plus rest easy knowing your files are safe).

By making it simple for our partners to build integrations using the HTML5 framework, we’re delivering on our vision of helping you work with all your important content and keep it centralized on Box – no matter where you work.

The updated versions of Box for NetSuite and Box for SugarCRM featuring the new Box Embed technology are available to customers this week, with the rest on their way soon.

The first 10 partners for Box Embed will be Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Zendesk.

Los Altos, Calif.-based Box has raised a staggering $287 million over several rounds of funding and is valued around $1.2 billion. Investors include General Atlantic, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Social+Capital Partnership.

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