for the past year, many of the smartest investors and pundits i follow have claimed some variant of the following: the mobile market for apps is maturing. they’re probably mostly right, as it’s hard to drive distribution on either platform (for different reasons), the venture appetite to take on such risk has been satiated,  so much of the echo chamber has moved on to new exciting platforms like virtual reality, automobiles, space, and beyond.

don’t get me wrong, vr, cars, and space are all fascinating areas — but, as a long-time software engineer dating back to palm all the way to twitter, to me mobile hasn’t yet matured. it may never mature, what with billions of people worldwide who will come online over the next decade, new features (as recent as google instant apps), and interesting overseas forks of android, especially in asia. put another way, one investor’s maturing market is another investor’s contrarian gold.

it is with that backdrop that i’m thrilled to announce that kleiner perkins is leading a $7.6m series a investment in buddybuild. in my role as a gp with kleiner, I’ll be joining dennis pilarinos, the ceo, on the bod of the company.

to perhaps (oversimplify) the pitch, buddybuild is both innovative and demonstrably useful in that it empowers developers with a unified process for building, testing, deploying, and collecting feedback on their mobile apps. in a pre-buddybuild world, developers had to cobble together and maintain disparate environments for each function, causing fragmentation which compounded at scale. to generate the positive response they have so far, buddybuild is of course fast, easy to use, and has simplified the development lifecycle. the proof is in the customer base, both big and small companies, which have found this platform to be their best buddy — sorry @buddybuild– in their quest for a seamless, iterative development environment at scale.

i’m excited to head back to vancouver more often now and reconnect with old friends. the founder of buddybuild, dennis, & i worked together many years ago at microsoft, and it is a rare pleasure to be able to so effortlessly support a colleague and friend again. we’re lucky to have that opportunity at kleiner perkins, and thanks to our new friends at buddybuild for making it a reality. vancouver, here we come!