Appcelerator: Meet The Largest Third-Party App Publisher for Apple, Android

Cross-platform developer Appcelerator, announced Tuesday it has raised $15 million in a third round of funding from investors including eBay, Mayfield Fund, Sierra Ventures,TransLink Capital, Red Hat and Storm Ventures.

Appcelerator also announced that it is now the largest third-party publisher in the Apple iOS and Android marketplaces, touting over 30,000 apps on 30 million devices.

We see Appcelerator's world-class integrated mobile platform as essential to overcoming increasing levels of fragmentation that currently challenge the entire mobile industry, said Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield Fund.

Appcelerator, based in Mountain View, Calif., plans to tap the money to expand into Europe and Asia, and also help build up the company's flagship mobile development platform, Titanium.

The Titanium platform allows developers to build native and HTML 5 Web apps for smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. More than 1.6 million developers use Titanium to build software for 30 million unique devices, a 12-fold increase over the last year.

Appcelerator has grown considerably since its last funding round in November 2010. The company has grown from 17 employees to 100, and has signed 1,000 new customers to its platform, including NBC, eBay, ZipCar, GameStop, ThomsonReuters and Progressive Insurance.

Appcelerator has become the agent of change for Fortune 500 companies looking to make a strategic move to mobile, Chaddha said.

Responding to high demand from Europe and Asia, Appcelerator plans to open an office in the UK next quarter, and is working with TransLink Capital to move its way into Japan, Korea and China.

Android and iOS are surging in Asian markets and there's a need by large OEMs, systems integrators, and multi-nationals in Asia to align themselves strategically with Appcelerator, said Toshiya Otani, managing director at TransLink. We are actively working with Appcelerator to secure major international strategic partnerships that have a global footprint.

Including the last three funding rounds, Appcelerator has raised $31.5 million. The company was founded by developers Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright and got its initial financing from Storm Ventures. Director Larry Augustin was among the earliest advocates of open-source software and co-founded VLinux, now known as SourceForge.