It was founded in 2004 as Sonoa Systems and received $173 million in funding before went public in April 2015, according to CrunchBase.
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Apigee helps organizations manage and use APIs (application program interfaces), the software connections that let programs interact.
To give both developers and non-technical staffers new connectivity powers, Google has agreed to buy API manager Apigee, of San Jose, Calif., for about $625 million, subject to regulatory approval.
Forrester sees a growing market for API management, with annual spending from US companies quadrupling from $140 million in 2014 to $660 million in 2020.
Apigee has an API platform, which allows a company’s backend services to talk to mobile and web-based apps used by their customers and partners.
“Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs (Application Programming Interface)”, said Dianne Greene, who runs Google’s cloud computing division.
Apigee’s shares were trading above the offer price at $17.45 on Thursday morning. Apigee enables this by providing am API management platform that supports multi-language, development, test, publish and analytics capabilities. Its customers include AT&T (T), Burberry (BURBY), Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and eBay (EBAY). Google offered Dollars 17.40 per share for the company, a small premium on its last closing price.
The acquisition will prove helpful as Google expands its roster of enterprise clients, Greene said. The companies expect the deal to be completed by the end of the year.
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“Many companies understand the importance of using digital technologies to transform business models and processes, but often they pursue digital and cloud independently. Smart companies realize that these are two sides of the same coin; that digital strategy must converge with cloud strategy”, Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor wrote in his own blog post.
