In a round led by Safeguard Scientifics, enterprise PaaS provider Apprenda raised $24 million. The Series D takes the company’s total funding to $56 million. Also participating in the round were New Enterprise Associates and Ignition Partners.

Apprenda plans to put the new capital to work adding staff to its engineering, product, client services, and sales teams. Up to half of the 50 new employees are expected to be developers. Apprenda currently employs 90 workers in its offices in Troy, New York, and Manhattan.

The company will also use the new resources to “deepen support for WebSphere and other IBM technologies” as well as focus on security-related integrations, in its goal to be the “world’s most compatible PaaS system.”

“We care about not only the net new application(s) that developers are building today,” Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller said, “but also the thousands of apps in these companies that are already there. We want to take all existing IP you have and help you run in a cloud-like way.”

Apprenda CEO and co-founder Sinclair Schuller presented his PaaS platform at FinovateFall 2013 in New York.

Apprenda is a development platform that enables building .NET and Java applications inside financial services and banking. As explained by Schuller during his FinovateFall appearance, the technology “stitches together the servers inside a data center into one unified cloud that banks and financial services can use in the context of their own private cloud solutions.” The platform provides a foundational software layer and application run-time environment that allows developers to focus on building new innovations rather than on negotiating and solving IT issues.

Last month, Apprenda announced that it was supported by VMware vCloud Air. The company released version 6 of its platform in April, featuring support for Docker containers, IBM WebSphere Application Server, and authentication protocols.

Apprenda demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2013 in New York. The company was founded in June 2005 and is headquartered in Troy, New York.