We met Ross Mason, the founder of MuleSoft, a little over 10 years ago. At that time, Ross was living in the UK and had begun work on an interesting open source project called MuleESB (Enterprise Service Bus).
Ross believed that existing software solutions did not meet the needs of modern enterprises for providing fast, easy, scalable connectivity between business applications.
The early adoption of MuleESB 10 years ago by developers in the open source community and by IT developers inside large enterprises provided clear validation that a new solution was needed, and that Mule’s simple but scalable interconnect architecture had strong appeal to these audiences for building new applications that required data and connectivity from existing systems.
Ross had a clear vision of what needed to be built and this, along with the pull from developers who were starting to apply MuleESB to real enterprise use cases, convinced us at Lightspeed to make our original investment in the company in May 2007.
Since that time, it’s been an amazing journey. The platform has stayed true to its original vision and has broadened meaningfully. Today, MuleSoft offers the “Anypoint Platform,” which organizations can use to connect their applications, data, and devices into an “application network,” in which these IT assets are pluggable using APIs instead of custom integration code.
The core team and organization have also grown meaningfully from a handful of people at the time of our original investment to over 800 employees today.
And the company now boasts over 1000 paying customers with a meaningful number of those coming the Global 2000.
We wanted to take a moment at Lightspeed to congratulate the entire MuleSoft team on your success to date, and on achieving an important milestone with your initial public offering today.
It’s been a privilege to have been one of your early partners and to have been able to support you along the journey over the past 10 years.
Sincerely, Ravi & the Lightspeed Team
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