Cloud startup Apprenda shuts down

Apprenda founder Sinclair
Schuller
Apprenda

• An investor in cloud startup Apprenda says that the
  company has ceased operations. It had raised $56 million in
  funding from top investors.
• The company has not formally announced any shutdown,
  and the CEO and other spokespeople are unavailable for
  comment. 
• Apprenda seems to have been a victim of the cloud
  computing wars, as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and hot startups
  like Docker and Mesosphere gobble up big chunks of the
  market. 
• Apprenda made it easier for companies to bring their
  apps to the cloud.

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One time high-flying
startup Apprenda has ceased operations, one of its venture
capital investors told analysts on a quarterly conference call.

“Apprenda recently decided to wind down its operations,”
said Brian Sisko, CEO of Apprenda investor
Safeguard Scientifics, as first reported by Chelsea
Diana at the
Albany Business Review last week. 

Apprenda, based in Troy, NY, has not commented publicly on a
possible shutdown. The only potential signs on its website is a
blank page where its executive leadership was once listed, and
the fact that its job listings have been yanked off the site.
Neither Schuller nor other employees at Apprenda immediately
returned a request for comment, nor did a representitive for
Safeguard Scientifics. 

Apprenda was a cloud startup co-founded and helmed by a former
Morgan Stanley IT developer, Sinclair Schuller, to help big
companies move their most mission-critical, custom built
applications to the cloud. Founded
in 2007, Apprenda had raised $56 million at a valuation of about
$90 million by 2015,
according to Pitchbook,
with investment from some heavy-hitter enterprise VCs like NEA
Partners and Ignition Partners.

At first, it tried to offer its own cloud product, but few
startups can successfully compete against cloud mammoths like
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

In more recent years, Apprenda focused on a hot new technology
called “containers” — particularly, a type of container tech
known as Kubernetes, which was invented at Google. Containers are
a way to help applications run more efficiently and reliably in
the cloud. But being in this market meant it was not only
competing with the cloud giants, but also with bigger,
highly-funded startups like Docker and Mesosphere.

It also had some heavy hitter angels and advisers during its
time, including  Data Collective VC Matthew Ocko, and Simon
Crosby, a well known software engineer in the open source world
who sold his first startup to Citrix for $500 million.

But, ultimately, Apprenda didn’t have the technology to attract
enough customers or to lure a bigger player into an acquisition,
Sisko reportedly explained on that conference call.

“It’s pretty unusual for a company to gain the level of traction
that Apprenda did, and then ultimately not successfully market
itself for exit. One point, there were some very significant
players who were more than sniffing around,” he said, though he
didn’t name who the potential buyers were.

Shutting down “was the right decision” because Apprenda needed to
“catch back up” with its technology and investors weren’t down
with that.

“The collective view around the table was that it wasn’t
appropriate to plow more capital into this opportunity,” Sisko
said.

And so Apprenda shut down.