Software startups Silicon Valley

Apprenda co-founders (from left) Matt Ammerman, Sinclair Schuller, Abraham Sultan. [Photo: David Yellen]

Six software engineers are packed into one room, intently coding beneath fluorescent lights. The CEO sits in a cramped cubicle against the wall just outside the kitchen, where a foosball table stands next to a “kegerator, ” a spigot-topped fridge stocked with beer home-brewed by members of the staff. Down the hall an exercise room has showers where coders who stay all night can sluice off before getting back to their task.

This is not a Silicon Valley startup. Rather it’s the office of Apprenda, a booming six-year-old software company in, of all places, Clifton Park, N.Y., a nondescript suburb 15 miles north of Albany. Apprenda makes so-called platform as a service (PaaS) software that helps its clients, which include JPMorgan Chase, Honeywell, Diebold and wholesale drug distributor AmerisourceBergen, create and run new mobile and cloud-based applications without having to burden their own IT departments.

Apprenda is in the midst of a major growth spurt, announcing million in third-round funding this chilly mid-November day, pumping its venture stake to million and accelerating its staffing needs. The plan: to double the number of employees to 100 within the year. “We hired five people in the last week, ” says co-founder Matt Ammerman, 34. “We’re looking in every department, from software engineering to client services to marketing.” Despite the hiring challenge, CEO Sinclair Schuller, 31, insists Apprenda’s location is an advantage. “I think being an enterprise software company not in Silicon Valley gives us the advantage of forcing investors to focus on the viability of our business and not the vanity of our location.”

Its far-flung funders agree. New Enterprise Associates, with offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, and Ignition Partners, also with a branch in Silicon Valley, together have committed $20 million. Ignition’s Frank Artale says the firm rarely invests in companies a plane ride away: “We knew that as long as they could recruit the kind of software development talent they needed, the company would be a success.”