AppDynamics

AppDynamics sold application performance management software that traced business transactions, such as a flight booking or a mobile money transfer, through the code and infrastructure behind them so enterprises could find and fix slowdowns. Jyoti Bansal, formerly a lead software architect at Wily Technology, founded the company in 2008. It was incorporated in Delaware on April 1, 2008 as Singularity Technologies, renamed AppDynamics in August 2009, and headquartered in San Francisco.

Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners backed the company from the start. Greylock partner Asheem Chandna and Lightspeed co-founder Ravi Mhatre joined the board in April 2008, the month of a $5.5 million Series A. Its registration statement lists later preferred rounds of $11.0 million (Series B, April 2010), $20.0 million (Series C, December 2011), $50.0 million (Series D, January 2013), $70.0 million (Series E, July 2014) and $158.4 million (Series F, October and November 2015), for $314.9 million in total. General Atlantic paid $75.0 million in the Series F and Institutional Venture Partners $7.0 million. Before the planned offering, Greylock and Lightspeed each held 20.8% of the shares, Institutional Venture Partners 8.3%, Kleiner Perkins 7.1%, General Atlantic 5.0% and Bansal 14.2%.

AppDynamics filed to list on Nasdaq under the ticker APPD with a price range of $12 to $14 per share, and General Atlantic, Adage Capital Partners and Altimeter indicated interest in buying up to $32.5 million in a concurrent private placement. Revenue reached $150.6 million in fiscal 2016 and $158.4 million in the nine months to October 31, 2016. In January 2017, days before the IPO, Cisco agreed to buy the company for $3.7 billion. Cisco closed the deal on March 17, 2017 and recorded purchase consideration of $3.26 billion, including $2.65 billion of goodwill. In 2025 AppDynamics was merged into Splunk, which Cisco acquired in 2024.

AppDynamics illustrates a dual-track exit, in which a company prepares a public listing while a strategic buyer bids for it, and the sale closes instead of the IPO. Greylock and Lightspeed reached liquidity about nine years after their first check, each holding about a fifth of the company, while growth investors such as General Atlantic, which bought in at $13.71 per share in the 2015 Series F, exited through the same sale. Cisco reported AppDynamics revenue within its Other product category after closing.