Cisco, SAP, Salesforce.com back MuleSoft and its quest to simplify on-premises and cloud integration; $131 million raised to this point.

Mulesoft has grown up, from a firm built around a quiet open source project to provide an enterprise service bus, right into a potential cloud behemoth. It now offers 200 connectors to supply integration, either on-premises or in its CloudHub service running on Amazon Web Services.

Its three most modern rounds a big gamble capital funding have boosted its take to $131 million, with the newest round of $50 million backed by Cisco. The former round was backed by Salesforce.com, and the only before that was backed by SAP AG. “It shows the neutrality of what we’re doing in the midst of everything,” declared Greg Schott, president and CEO, in an interview after Mulesoft announced the third round March 13.

Mulesoft will use the cash to expand all phases of its business, including engineering, marketing, sales, and locations worldwide. The necessity for connectivity — between applications and information sources, applications and partner systems, applications and cloud-based software-as-a-service, and applications and BYOD devices — threatens to swamp enterprise IT staffs in the event that they attempt to do everything in-house, Schott said.

Mulesoft sees a $500 billion marketplace for enterprise connectivity developing alongside the web of factors and the growing list of SaaS vendors, and it’s looking to grow fast enough to exploit the chance. It finished 2013 with 600 customers and 250 employees, after a considerable increase in headcount throughout the year. It would conclude 2014 with 500 employees, Schott said. “It’s a chance that’s so big that we’re aggressively going after it,” he noted.

[Desire to learn more about how MuleSoft launched its Cloud Hub on AWS? See Mulesoft’s Cure To SaaS Integration Headaches.]

Mulesoft was worth $800 million by the investors inside the latest round, a size that’s sometimes near the bar for an initial public offering. “We’re at a scale where there is a window for an IPO by the top of this year. That does not mean we’ll go after one. But we’ll be capable to accomplish that within the next 12-18 months,” he said.

Mulesoft offers its AnyPoint Platform of point-to-point connectors both on-premises and within the cloud. It is a hub for automating application-to-application connections and enabling services-oriented architecture on premises, between a premises and the cloud, or cloud-to-cloud, along with between SaaS vendors. Customers may connect SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, and other applications with the connectors supplied by the platform.

The MuleSoft Enterprise Service Bus was built as a light-weight connection system for London financial services by Ross Mason, former CTO and now VP of product strategy on the company. MuleSoft has steadily added to the variety of things it connects to, and five of the tip 10 banks are customers, Schott said. While MuleSoft builds most of its own connectors, it remains an open source project: The ESB and connectors are all open source code, and third parties and customers build their very own connectors with a MuleSoft DevKit, that are contributed back to the community.

MuleSoft earns its income through customers subscribing to technical support for his or her connectors.

Connecting applications and users’ devices to the things they need to be connected to “is the most important problem in IT that’s never been solved. We’re out to productize the overall area,” Schott said.

The AnyPoint Platform, when inside the cloud, runs on MuleSoft’s Cloub Hub, which itself is running atop AWS. In December, MuleSoft announced the way to establish private connections in a virtual private cloud in CloudHub. It also announced CloudHub Fabric as approach to arrange high availability and disaster recovery inside the cloud when integrating applications.

In addition to Cisco, participants within the $50 million, March 13 round were new investor Meritech Capital Partners, and existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Bay Partners.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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