Philly-based mobile platform developer appRenaissance announces $1.5 million seed round, led by FirstMark Capital

Tom Paine

appRenaissance, the Old City Philadelphia-based mobile app development platform startup, today announced in a press release it had received seed funding of $1.5 million, lead by FirstMark Capital with additional investments by CEO Bob Moul and other angel investors.

Founded in 2010 by Scott Wasserman, appRenaissance hired its first employees in May of last year and says it is on pace to reach $1 million in revenue in its first full year of operation. Moul, who as CEO of Boomi helped lead it to being acquired by Dell in 2010, where it is now at the center of its Cloud strategy, came on board at the beginning of the year. In addition to developing individual mobile applications, appRenaissance also provides development tools and infrastructure, including what it calls its Unifeed Mobile Middleware platform, which it says speeds development time and simplifies integration with enterprise applications.

It is not surprising that FirstMark led the seed round, since I believe it was the sole institutional investor in Boomi. I have never found out exactly what Dell paid for Boomi (my guess is something north of $100 million), but FirstMark must have done well on that investment because Boomi didn't require that much capital prior to its exit (FirstMark led a $4 million round in 2008). FirstMark Managing Director Amish Jani, who was involved in the Boomi relationship, will be working again with Moul at appRenaissance, although board seats have not been announced.

Founder Wasserman, who received his computer science degree from the University of Delaware, has been the key technology guy at several area startups and development shops. He is also listed as being CTO of BizEquity Corp, an appRenaissance client based in Wayne which offers a cloud-based service geared towards simplifying the business valuation process. Geekadelphia featured Wasserman last month as their "Geek of the Week".

appRenaissance says the round will be used to add several key hires and accelerate development of its Unifeed middleware platform. The company's website currently shows it having nine employees.

Read press release.



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