Xamarin raises $12M for cross-platform mobile apps

Xamarin has raised $12 million in its first outside investment into its C# based mobile apps platform for iOS and Android. The company was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in the wake of the acquisition of Novell by Attachmate and the subsequent reorganisation. Xamarin then took over support for SUSE Mono customers and the MonoTouch and Mono for Android products. Xamarin now focuses on the latter products, providing C# runtimes for iOS and Android, and offers tools such as Xamarin Designer for Android to produce mobile applications faster.

The funding has been provided by Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate, and the company plans to use this to fund the expansion of its range of developer tools and to build a sales and marketing team. "This funding will enable us to scale our success and better deliver on our mission, bringing millions more developers to mobile", said Friedman as CEO of Xamarin.

The company builds its products around the open source implementation of C# and the .NET runtime, Mono, which it also supports and helps maintain. Xamarin now claims around 150,000 developers and 7,500 paying customers for its products, including rdio and National Instruments. Although both the iOS and Android versions use C# as their underlying language and generate native executable code for each platform, the runtimes expose the native platform's APIs rather than a generic API to allow developers to exploit the full capabilities of the devices it runs on. Pricing for the company's products run from $400 for a "professional user" to $2,500 for an "enterprise developer" with priority support.

(djwm)