Apica raises $2 Million for US Expansion

The leading load testing and performance-monitoring provider for cloud and mobile applications, Apica, managed to raise $2 million in a second round of funding. The series B round of funding has been led by Industrifonden, but KTH Chalmers Capital, one of the previous investors, and ALMI Invest, one of the new investors, also participated to this funding round. All these investors are based in Sweden and they are putting their hopes on Apica’s development of its services and its expansion on the US market.

Sven Hammar, the CEO at Apica, stated the following: “We’ll use the investment to build out sales and marketing in the U.S. to compete against the likes of SOASTA on load testing and Keynote Systems on performance monitoring, for example. We compete with these companies; however, Apica offers the best fully integrated testing and monitoring solution for cloud and mobile applications.”

It is recently that the company has released a new product, the Apica Watch, which is a new cloud service which provides full support for Selenium, allowing their customers to be able to monitor their websites from the perspective of a final customer, the end-user. Also, the company has recently developed an iPhone application which allows users to be able to monitor their performance on a non-stop basis from anywhere. The company has also been working on developing strategic partnerships with the leading cloud players from RightScale and Rackspace.

The partner at KTH Chalmers Capital, Jonas Rahmn, announced the following: “Since our first investment in spring 2007, Apica has undergone fantastic growth — from a small local player to the point where it is now seriously positioning itself in the U.S. With this investment, the company will have the opportunity to take another big step forward in executing on its expansion plans.”

The Investment Manager from Industrifonden, Johan Englund, declared the following: “We’re delighted to invest in Apica’s business. Given the company’s strong entrepreneurial team and robust market segment, we believe that Apica’s prospects for success are excellent.” Industrifonden is a fund which generally supports small and medium sized companies from Sweden. They are generally interested in businesses which have the potential of growing at the international level. This Swedish fund possesses assets of about SEK 3 billion, SEK 1.5 billion of which is already invested in 80 companies operating in the technological field, cleantech, life science and the industry field.

Apica is a company which provides load testing and performance monitoring solutions which are intended to test, monitor and optimize cloud and mobile applications. They now have more than 250 customers, gathering names such as Newsday, PricewaterhouseCoopers, eBay Sweden and Thomas Cook. The products offered by Apica are uniquely designed in order to suit the cloud infrastructure and they are extremely qualitative as they can perform some of the largest published load tests which have ever been conducted. Some of their best known applications which estimate the maximum capacity and the real-time performance and which provide solutions for improving load times are Apica LoadTest, Apica WebPerformance and Apica WebOverload. The company has been founded in 2005 and it operates from Stockholm, Sweden and Palo Alto, California. They also have offices in the United Kingdom.