San Francisco startup Parse, which makes a software platform that adds a cloud component to any mobile app, has raised $ 5.5 million from Ignition Partners.
The funding round serves as a Series A for the startup and brings its total outside investment to $ 7 million. Earlier this year, Parse took on $ 1.5 million from Y-Combinator, in which it was incubated, and a group of angel investors.
Parse explains its service like this: What Heroku does for web apps, Parse does for mobile apps. The company’s platform allow iOS and Android mobile app developers to store their data on servers without having to configure server-side code or worry about deployment and maintenance. Stackmob and Kinvey do similar things, but Parse says it is superior because it gives developers the easiest, fastest results. “Our philosophy is that you can type in a few lines of our code, hit run, and start saving data to our servers,” co-founder Tikhon Bernstam told me in an interview earlier this year.
According to another Parse co-founder James Yu, the platform has been met with lots of enthusiasm since it debuted this past summer. Over 3500 developers are now on the Parse platform, and the company now processes millions of transactions per day — and the platform’s mobile traffic is growing 40 percent week over week. All that is creating a lot of work for the startup’s seven person team — which is probably why Yu says Parse is “hiring aggressively.” The new money should come in handy for that.
For a more in-depth look at what Parse does, check out the elevator pitch from Yu and Bernstam:
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