Palo Alto: California-based API management products and services provider Apigee has acquired mobile cloud platform Usergrid. As part of the acquisition, Ed Anuff, Founder & CEO, Usergrid would join Apigee’s leadership team, where he would continue to guide the development of the Usergrid software. With the acquisition Apigee would be able to enable enterprises and developers to simplify and scale delivery of the full universe of APIs.

Usergrid, which is currently in the beta version, will be offered as a part of Apigee’s enterprise API platform and free API developer tools in the forthcoming months. The company will also continue to provide Usergrid as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and is also available as a free open source software stack which can be used by enterprises and developers to host in their own cloud.

According to Chet Kapoor, CEO, Apigee, Usergrid delivers an ‘instant’ mobile app back-end server that can reduce the cost of developing mobile apps by upto 80 percent. Apigee is focused on accelerating growth and innovation with a full range of solutions for managing and using APIs. Kapoor who currently heads Apigee, was previously the CEO of Gluecode (acquired by IBM). He was also the Vice President at webMethods and held various positions at NeXT.

Apigee, which was formerly known as Sonoa Systems, was founded in 2004. The company has raised a total of $52.1 million in funding. It raised $12 million in series A round of funding in 2005from Bay Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, $16 million in series B round in 2006 from Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Juniper Networks, and SAP Ventures. Apigee also secured $10 million in series C in 2008 from Third Point Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners, and SAP Ventures and an unattributed sum of $14.1 million from Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Juniper Networks, and SAP Ventures.

According to Ed Anuff, Founder & CEO, Usergrid, Apigee is the leading API platform trusted by several enterprises and he is thrilled to join its leadership team. Usergrid had been in the development stage for over 18 months and had a huge momentum. He feels that it would takeoff properly after becoming a part of Apigee.