Apprenda, the leading enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS), today announced the closing of a $24 million funding round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Ignition Partners.

Apprenda will use the funding to further the adoption of its enterprise PaaS, which helps large organizations—including JPMorgan Chase, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen—transform into software-defined enterprises and save money. Apprenda’s success stems from the belief that no enterprise should be forced to get rid of existing investments and applications to adopt a next-generation platform.

“We believe PaaS is only doable one way—the customer’s way,” said Sinclair Schuller, CEO and co-founder of Apprenda. “This means our technology had to be built to support everything upstream and downstream from our platform in a highly compatible way. And because of this, our vision of helping enterprises convert their data centers into cloud platforms supercharged for developer productivity has become a reality.”

The company will also use the funding to aggressively hire new members for its engineering, product, client services and sales teams. This funding round was fueled by existing investors, who strongly believe in Apprenda’s offering to enterprises and know the company is years ahead of the competition. This round brings the company’s total financing to date to $56 million.

“It has become widely accepted that an independent PaaS is the most efficient way to run a large internal technology environment,” said Phillip Moyer, Managing Director, Technology at Safeguard and Member of Apprenda’s Board of Directors. “Apprenda’s deep 10-year investment in enterprise PaaS technology is paying off with significant customer traction and market-wide recognition. We are proud to continue to partner with Sinclair and his team as they scale to the next level with this funding.”

“With businesses all over the world seeking to modernize their application infrastructure, the growth in interest for Platform-as-a-Service technologies has been explosive,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “Apprenda’s recent funding round is both a sign of this growth as well as a means of capitalizing on it.”