MuleSoft Prepares for IPO

According to Gartner, the market for SaaS- and cloud-based business application services is projected to grow at an annual rate of 20% over 2011 through 2016. The market is estimated to be worth more than $32.8 billion in 2016, compared with $13.5 billion in 2011. Increasing adoption of these new technologies has also led to the problem of integration. Organizations are looking for platforms that will help simplify the communication between multiple SaaS services with mobile and on-premise legacy systems.
MuleSoft’s Financials
San Francisco–based MuleSoft was founded in 2006 to address this problem. MuleSoft began as an open-source project known as the Mule. It was led by Ross Mason, current CTO of the company. Mason wanted to create a platform that offered simplicity and flexibility to developers worldwide. Today, MuleSoft is known for their integration platform that connects SaaS and enterprise applications through either a cloud-based platform or on-premise enterprise software. Using their tools, companies can integrate data from SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com into their apps.

MuleSoft’s products include the Anypoint Platform, which is a next generation integration platform that enables organizations to connect to multiple applications, data sources, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The platform includes their core products, the CloudHub, Mule ESB and Tcat. CloudHub, is a cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that connects SaaS, cloud and on-premise applications and APIs. Mule ESB is their open source enterprise service bus offering that is used to connect enterprise applications on-premise and to the cloud. Tcat is their enterprise Tomcat application server that helps in management of resources by simplifying application provisioning, and diagnostics tasks for administrators.

More than 150,000 developers are working on MuleSoft’s applications. MuleSoft earns revenues by charging a subscription fee for their support, consulting, and training services. Their paying customers include over 400 companies, including Walmart, MasterCard, Nokia, Nestlé, Honeywell and DHL.

While they do not divulge their financials, MuleSoft announced that their bookings grew 171% during the last year. MuleSoft has  raised $80.5 million in funding from investors that include Morgenthaler Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, Bay Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Salesforce. Their last round of funding was held last year when they raised $37 million from their existing investors.

MuleSoft is using the funds to fuel product development and international expansion. Recently, they opened regional headquarters in Sydney and Buenos Aires to cater to growing demand in these markets. They are also seeing strong growth in the emerging markets of Africa and the Middle East.

MuleSoft’s opportunity can be gauged by the fact that today there are more than 13,000 public APIs. As more and more organizations adopt these APIs, the need for connectors with other systems will remain – an opportunity that MuleSoft is banking on.