Appirio Acquires Topcoder, Beefing Up its Crowdsourcing Technology Platform

Cloud services provider Appirio has acquired TopCoder, an organization that hosts a community of more than 500,000 developers, designers and data analytics experts. The deal combines the TopCoder community with CloudSpokes, Appirio's own crowdsouring platform and community of more than 75,000 developers, designers and analytics experts. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The company said the acquisition will promote a technology platform that enables crowdsourcing as a core part of next generation services.

As part of the deal, Narinder Singh, co-founder of Appirio, was appointed president of the combined communities; TopCoder founder Jack Hughes will join Appirio’s crowdsourcing advisory board; and David Messinger, vice president of community at CloudSpokes, has been promoted to chief community officer of the combined communities.

Appirio co-founder and CEO Chris Barbin said in a prepared statement that his company believes crowdsourcing is an effective way to increase innovation, as well as deliver cost-effective solutions.

"The rise of the sharing economy is quickly rendering the traditional systems integration and offshore biased model obsolete," he said. "Together, the CloudSpokes and TopCoder communities offer more elastic development and design resources than Accenture, Deloitte and InfoSys combined."

CloudSpokes will also add an additional track for cloud development at the TopCoder Open, the conference scheduled for November 10-14, 2013, and the company will also increase the prize money there.

Appirio closed $60 million in Series D funding last year, led by global growth investor General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.