Appcelerator

About Appcelerator

Appcelerator was established in 2006 by Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright. The two founders met in Atlanta at Vocalocity, a voice-over-IP company Haynie had co-founded and subsequently sold in 2006. Initially founded as Hakano, a Web 2.0 application development company, it was renamed Appcelerator in 2007 as it began creating an open-source platform for rich internet applications. Haynie, a serial entrepreneur who started programming at age 12, and Wright, an electrical engineering graduate from Vanderbilt University with experience at Accenture and Netscape, initially self-funded the venture. The company relocated from Atlanta to Mountain View, California, in 2008 and later moved its headquarters to San Jose in 2015.

The core of Appcelerator's business is a mobile technology platform designed to help developers build native applications for multiple operating systems from a single JavaScript codebase. Its flagship product, Titanium, is an open-source software development kit (SDK) that allows for the creation of native apps for platforms like iOS and Android. This approach enables developers with web technology skills (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) to create applications that look, feel, and perform like natively-coded ones, accessing device features such as the file system, network, and camera. The platform also included the Appcelerator Platform, a broader offering that featured real-time mobile analytics to track user acquisition and engagement, and tools for API creation and management. The business model focused on providing a free, open-source SDK to build a large developer community, while generating revenue from enterprise-grade tools, support, and cloud services. Clients ranged from independent developers to large enterprises in sectors like retail, finance, and healthcare.

Appcelerator achieved several significant milestones, including raising over $90 million in venture capital from investors like eBay, Red Hat, and Accel by 2014. The company experienced rapid growth, expanding its employee count fivefold between 2010 and 2011. It also made a series of strategic acquisitions to enhance its platform, including IDE company Aptana, backend-as-a-service provider Cocoafish, and API management company Singly. In January 2016, Appcelerator was acquired by Axway, a French enterprise software company, in an all-cash deal that saw all employees join Axway. The acquisition was aimed at integrating Appcelerator's mobile development capabilities with Axway's API management and data integration solutions. However, in February 2021, Axway announced that the Appcelerator offering would be discontinued by March 2022, with the Titanium SDK being released back to the open-source community.