FinovateAsia 2013 alum App Annie has raised $55 million in Series D funding, taking the company’s total capital to $94 million.
The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and featured participation from current investors, Greycroft Partners, IDG Capital Partners, and Sequoia Capital. App Annie plans to use the capital for product development, international expansion, and to “fund potential M&A activity.” Note that App Annie acquired Distimo last year.
In addition to the funding, App Annie will gain a new board member, Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP. Talking about the company, Liaw said in a statement: “Before App Annie, the app ecosystem was largely flying blind. App Annie provides actionable insight into this explosive sector of technology and, as a result, they are the ubiquitous standard for the app industry.”
Added App Annie co-founder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt, “App Annie now integrates app sales, search, advertising, demographics, and usage data into one unified, standardized platform. Any company that wants to remain relevant is now an app publisher, and we’re confident they will all need App Annie to move their mobile business forward.”
Schmitt has a point. For many, when the question is app analytics and market data, the answer is App Annie. Since 2010, the company has become the one-stop-shop for business owners, technologists, and analysts looking to understand trends in the app market. To this end, a handful of metrics helps give a sense of the company’s presence in the industry:
- More than 90% of the top 100 app publishers use App Annie’s technology
- More than 675,000 apps use App Annie Analytics to track downloads
- More than 79 billion downloads tracked, representing more than $24 billion in gross app store revenue to date
- More than 75% year-over-year growth in user base to more than 350,000
App Annie’s product suite has three main offerings: Store Stats, Analytics, and Intelligence. Store Stats focuses on the app stores, tracking and recording the hour-to-hour performance of apps across categories and regardless of country. The Analytics platform helps app publishers collect and visualize important metrics such as downloads, revenue, rankings, reviews, and event tracking. The Intelligence component provides overall app market data. This can be used for everything from planning an entry into a new market, to studying the app performance of competitors, to analyzing app trends in popularity and revenue.
This leads to App Annie’s next product release: the launch of Usage Intelligence. Usage intelligence is a tool for enterprise users that provides mobile access to “active user and engagement trends” for thousands of apps around the world.
Usage Intelligence provides metrics on active users (MAU, WAU, DAU), time spent, usage frequency, and retention. Said Schmitt, “Usage data is of paramount importance to mobile app publishers and investors, particularly when you are talking about analyzing apps that monetize outside the store”.
In this way, Usage Intelligence is best viewed as an extension of the capabilities of App Annie’s Intelligence solution. The technology is currently in beta, with access limited to a few customers. The full release is scheduled for the second quarter of 2015.
