Sirqul announced $5 million in funding on Wednesday, as the 2-year-old startup gets ready to come out of stealth mode and make a push to expand globally.
The Seattle-based company, which was launched in 2013 by Amazon Web Services co-founder Robert Frederick, has spent the past couple of years building a platform that helps developers launch apps faster.
It has taken on early customers to prove the concept and generate some revenue. But now Frederick says people should keep an eye out for Sirqul, pronounced “circle,” to start making a real splash in the coming months.
The company is backed by big-name investors include former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta; former Amazon CIO Rick Dalzell; former Facebook general counsel Rudy Gadre; Tripp Blair, a veteran of Motorola, Sun and other companies; Xiang Gao, Gome.com.cn CEO and Cybernaut Investment senior partner; and Ray Chen, CEO of Taiwanese device giant Compal Electronics. The company says it expects to add more investors soon.
“We’ve basically built something that we know works. It scales,” said Frederick, who also was one of the technical founders of the Amazon Anywhere secure mobile commerce initiative. “We want to be able to scale our company and let more companies know we exist.”
Sirqul is targeting startups and enterprises that want to build their own platform. The idea is to license chunks of code that they can plug into their own apps for routine processes, like mobile payments, notifications and search.
Frederick said to think about all of Sirqul’s 324 APIs like Legos pieces. Startups license what they need and fit them together to solve their unique need.
“They can focus on their ideas instead of recreating the wheel,” Frederick added.
