apptio-logo1Apptio is not playing small ball.

Just 14 months after raising a $50 million venture round, Bellevue-based Apptio is back with a little more cash in its pocket. The company, which offers on-demand software and services for managing corporate IT departments, today is announcing that it has raised another $45 million in series E funding.

It marks one of the largest venture rounds in a Seattle area company so far this year, and it cements Apptio’s position as one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the region. It also comes even though Apptio was still sitting on a substantial pile of cash from its previous round.

New investors include Janus Capital, The Hillman Company and an unnamed global institutional investor. Existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and T. Rowe Price Associates also participated. Total funding stands at $136 million.

The last round of capital came in at a very healthy $600 million valuation. And while co-founder and CFO Kurt Shintaffer declined to go into details on valuation this time, he did say it is a “substantial up round.” That could put Apptio in the range of another fast-growing company in the Seattle area. Zulily, which won the “Deal of the Year” and “Next Tech Titan” categories at last week’s GeekWire Awards, raised $85 million at a whopping $1 billion valuation. (It too is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen).

gupta-apptio
Apptio’s Sunny Gupta at the company’s new Bellevue HQ.

Apptio’s new money will be used to expand into Europe, and continue development on the Apptio platform. The company, which moved into new offices in downtown Bellevue earlier this year, already has nearly tripled its workforce in the past 18 months. It now employs more than 350, with Shintaffer saying that it will likely end the year at about 425 employees worldwide.

For now, Shintaffer said that the company has enough space at its Bellevue headquarters to accommodate growth.

Apptio continues to add new customers, with 29 of the Fortune 100 companies (including Boeing, Target and Xerox) using its so-called Technology Business Management platform. Its revenues nearly doubled last year, though Shintaffer declined to provide exact numbers.

“Every day we are seeing all of the signals that we are in a very large software category, and it is taking shape right before our eyes,” said Shintaffer, adding that they are “accelerating on all fronts.”

The company has been discussed as a potential IPO candidate, and Gupta has made overtones in the past that he wants to build a long lasting (and large) Pacific Northwest enterprise software company. That remains the ultimate goal, says Shintaffer.

Kurt Shintaffer
Kurt Shintaffer

“At this point, we felt the best thing for the company was to invest money through a private financing, and we continue to evaluate if the public markets are the right option for us,” he said. “Being a public company has never specifically been our goal, it is building a great, long-lasting company here in the Northwest.” (Interestingly, Apptio investor Marc Andreessen just noted on CNBC that most tech companies aren’t positioning to go public because the incentives are so great to raise money privately).

Given how fast the market is growing, Apptio does face competition.

The closest potential competitor is VMware, though Shintaffer said that Apptio’s service is far different because it is “purpose-built” to answer the most pressing IT spending and management questions.

“We are not using legacy technology to solve this problem,” he said. “We are unencumbered by any motivations to sell other software product that may be promoted by that same company, so it gives us that ability to be that neutral party that can help CIOs in their organizations in this new IT world that they are living in without any biases.”

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