The market for enterprise-grade app platforms is continuing to attract substantial investments. Today's funding announcement of $16M Series B funding for mobile first startup Xamarin follows on the coattails of Appcelerator's $12.1M funding announcement just yesterday, bringing the company up to a total of more than $63M in funding.  In the past few months companies such as FeedHenry and Kony have also received notable funding rounds.

This uptick in funding in the MDP market is indicative of a clear market gap.  While the past year has seen substantial interest in the enterprise community in development of sophisticated internal andcustomer-facing mobile apps, these organizations face a tremendous uphill battle in actually developing these apps.  MDP vendors have emerged to try to rectify this challenge, bringing attractive UIs and simple platforms to maket to facilitate rapid, cost-effective development of cross-platform apps.

More tenured vendors in this space, such as Antenna and Verivo, continue to invest to build out strong functionality (including HTML 5 and enhanced integration capabilities), brands and channel relationships in the market.  As newer entrants (FeedHenry, Sencha, Xamarin and Appcelerator) grow their customer bases, we expect to see significant product announcements and continued funding announcements in the months to come.  Verivo, for example, launched Akula just this month, complementing the company's existing MDP product with an open platform solution. Sencha, an HTML5 oriented MDP, announced Sencha Space just today at its annual SenchaCon event.  Sencha Space is a secure and managed environment for deploying mobile HTML5 business applications.