Congratulating Apcera

This morning, Ericsson announced that is has acquired a majority stake in True portfolio company Apcera. This is an incredible partnership for both companies and we are thrilled for Founder Derek Collison and the rest of the Apcera team. Apcera will continue to operate as a standalone company with Ericsson committing significant funding for Apcera’s technology and global expansion of its enterprise sales channel. The all-cash deal marks the most significant investment to date in deploying the next generation of PaaS technology.

When we first invested in Derek back in May 2012, we already knew he was a special entrepreneur. His experience set was unique among his contemporaries, and he was in a class of his own when it came to building complex and distributed systems. His time at Tibco, Google and VMware proved he was a creator and inventor who had a knack for building “the next thing” and turning naysayers into believers.

At True, we strive to maximize risk at the earliest stages behind the visionaries in the industry. The more disruptive and innovative the idea, the more likely we are to sign up, so we jumped at the chance to lead Apcera’s seed round and, later, jumped again at the opportunity to lead the A round.

This is truly just the beginning of the journey for Apcera as we are in the early innings of the largest transformation of the data center in history. While we’re sad to see Derek ”graduate” from the True Founder community, we are very excited about his company’s potential now that it has joined forces with Ericsson.

Congratulations again to Derek and the entire Apcera team, along with Ericsson VP Jason Hoffman, someone we have known and worked with for a long time. We celebrate today and look forward to the journey ahead!

Read more about the news on Gigaom.