Appnomic Systems raises $22 mn led by Avataar Ventures; appoints new CEO

Cupertino and Bengaluru-based information technology infrastructure management services firm Appnomic Systems has raised $22 million in a growth round led by Avataar Ventures.

The company also announced a new senior management structure. It has appointed technology veteran Nitin Kumar as the new CEO, Cuneyt Buyukbezci as CMO and Girish Muckai as the CRO.

D Padmanabhan, the former CEO and founder, will continue in an operating role as the chairman, the company said in a statement.

Kumar has previously held leadership roles in startups, enterprises, and management consulting firms, including HP, Deloitte, PwC, and FTI.

“Businesses are looking for providing better customer experiences, less downtime, and cost savings. Organizations integrating self-healing systems have a competitive advantage over those that do not. Appnomic has multiple patents in the self-healing domain and continues to innovate in this arena,” Kumar said.

Cuneyt Buyukbezci has previously worked with HP Software, Sun Microsystems, and CA Technologies while Muckai worked with Passage AI and Juniper Networks in the past.

“Appnomic offers the industry’s first autonomous IT operations software. These funds will allow Appnomic to expand its global presence and market reach to enable autonomous business operations, which will save companies a tremendous amount of time and money, said Mohan Kumar, Managing Partner at Avataar Ventures.”

The company has not disclosed the identities of other investors in the round.

Founded in 2006, Appnomic is a global provider of software and software as a service solutions (SaaS) for predictive, application-centric and autonomic management of IT infrastructure. It offers solutions that enable autonomous IT operations by predicting and preventing problems.

Appnomic uses unsupervised AI to learn how a system works under normal circumstances and creates a dynamic baseline. The solution is capable of detecting if crossing a threshold is normal behaviour, or even if a seemingly normal behaviour is problematic. Appnomic’s clients have on average faced 60% reduction in false-positive alerts, 60% reduction in developer time spent on solving problems, and 75% decrease in issues, the company claims.

According to the company, its software solutions have enabled over 40 customers to prevent more than 250,000 severe incidents a year. This amounts to 850,000+ man-hours savings, and more than $40,000,000 in costs, excluding the impact on the customers’ brand and external relationships, the company claims.

The company had raised $5 million in a Series C round of funding from Norwest Venture Partners in September 2012.

Avataar Ventures is a venture capital firm founded by former Norwest partner Mohan Kumar and former Freshworks COO Nishant Rao. Appnomic was one of six companies that Avataar acquired from Norwest this year. Elastic Run, Zenoti, CRMNext, Manthan Systems and Capillary Technologies were the other portfolios that Avataar acquired. 

It is now raising a $300-million fund that will primarily invest in growth-stage business-to-business (B2B) and software-as-a-service (Saas) companies. In September, it roped in global private equity investment firm HarbourVest Partners LLC as its single Limited Partner.