There’s no shortage of startups trying to help mobile developers quickly and easily build cross-platform apps for an ever-expanding line-up of gadgets, from iPhones to Android tablets to Windows Phone devices.
Now, a new San Francisco startup by the name of Xamarin, which rose from the ashes after layoffs at Attachmate’s Novell unit, is making inroads in that very hot category. The company today is announcing $12 million in series A funding from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate, money it will use to bolster its sales and marketing efforts.
Started as an open source program at Novell known as Mono, the Xamarin platform has already been used by more than 150,000 mobile developers to build apps on multiple devices. The company, with more than 7,500 paying customers, is led by Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza.
“Our mission is to make it fast, easy and fun to build great mobile apps,” said Xamarin CEO Friedman. “We’ve had a tremendous first year, validated by more than 12,000 new developers per month, and millions of dollars in revenue. This funding will enable us to scale our success and better deliver on our mission, bringing millions more developers to mobile.”
Xamarin is in the same space as Buddy Platform, the Seattle area upstart led by former Microsoft employees Jeffrey MacDuff and Dave McLauchlan. It raised $1 million earlier this year.
Ignition actually holds a stake in another startup operating in this arena: San Francisco’s Parse. And last year, Adobe gobbled up the maker of PhoneGap, yet another player.
