Based in Boston Apptopia, a company that provides competitive intelligence in the mobile app ecosystem, has secured $ 20 million in Series C funding to advance its expansion beyond the mobile app world. The new financing, led by ABS Capital Partners, follows three consecutive years of 50% year-over-year growth for Apptopia’s business, which has been profitable since early last year, the company said.
Existing investors, including Blossom Street Ventures, also participated in the round. Mike Avon of ABS Capital, Co-Founder of Millennial Media, and Paul Mariani are joining Apptopia’s board of directors this round.
The funding follows Apptopia’s claims that there has been an increased demand from brands to better understand the digital aspects of their business.
Apptopia’s customers today include hundreds of corporations and financial institutions, including Google, Visa, Coca-Cola, Target, Zoom, NBC, Unity Technologies, Microsoft, Adobe, Glu, Andreessen Horowitz, and Facebook.
In the past, Apptopia’s clients examined digital engagement and macro-level interactions. Now, however, they want to delve deeper into certain details and need more data. For example, a brand may previously wanted to know how well a competitor’s advertisement was doing in terms of new users or app sessions. Now they want to know the answers to certain questions – for example, how many individual users have participated, whether those users have already been customers, whether they have returned after the promotion was over, and so on.
Most of Apptopia’s business is now focused on delivering these kinds of responses to enterprise customers who subscribe to Apptopia’s data – and possibly data from competitors such as Sensor Tower and App Annie, with the aim of bringing together data sets more precisely to understand the Competitive landscape.
Apptopia’s own data has not always been considered the most accurate historically, admits Jonathan Kay, CEO of Apptopia. But it has improved over the years.
Kay, previously COO of Apptopia, will now take the lead from co-founder Eliran Sapir, who will become CEO when the company moves into the next phase of growth.
Apptopia’s competitors such as Sensor Tower and App Annie use mobile panels to collect app data, among other things, explains Kay. These panels include consumer-facing apps like VPN clients and ad blockers that users would download not necessarily understanding that they consented to their app usage data being collected. This created some controversy as the open secret was the app data industry exposed by the media to consumers, As a result, the companies have optimized their information.
However, the practice continues and has not affected the growth of businesses. The Sensor Tower, for example, raised $ 45 million last year as the demand for app data continued to grow. And all companies involved are expanding with new products and Services for your data-hungry customer bases.
Credit: Apptopia
Apptopia, meanwhile, has decided not to expand its business into the back of mobile panels. (Though in its earlier days it tested such a plan and then scrapped it.)
It receives access to data from customers of its app developers – and this data is already aggregated and anonymized from the developers’ Apple and Google Analytics accounts.
This method initially put Apptopia at a disadvantage. Competitors had more accurate data from around 2016 to 2018 as they used mobile panels, says Kay. However, Apptopia made a strategic decision not to take this type of risk – that is, to build a business that Apple or Google could close at any moment.
“Instead, we’ve invested in data science and algorithms for years,” notes Kay. “We found out how an identical or larger signal can be extracted from the same data set [competitors] had access to. “
Apptopia took what Kay calls “huge, huge amounts of historical data” and over time learned what signals were included in an app’s App Store ranking. Many people still think that an app’s rank is largely determined by downloads, but there are now a variety of signals that inform rank, Kay points out.
“Really, a rank is just a collection of analytical data points that Apple and Google give points for,” he explains. This includes, for example, the number of sessions, the number of users, the time spent in an app, and much more. “Since we didn’t have these panels, we spent years figuring out how to reverse engineer better than our competitors. And finally, we figured out how to get the same signal that they can get from the panel from the rank. This has made such a rapidly growing and successful business possible for us in recent years. “
Since Apptopia was already profitable, it did not have to collect any donations. However, the company wanted to accelerate its expansion into new areas, including planned expansion outside of mobile apps.
Today, in addition to their cell phones and tablets, consumers also use “apps” on their computers, smartwatches and televisions. And companies no longer just want to know what’s happening on mobile devices – they want the full picture of app usage.
“We found a way to do this that doesn’t depend on what our competitors have done in the past,” says Kay. “So we’re not going to use apps to spy on people,” he explains.
However, the company was not ready at this point to offer any further details on its future product plans. But Kay said Apptopia wouldn’t rule out partnerships or acquisitions to achieve its future goals.
Apptopia also sees a broader future in making its app data more accessible. For example, last year she partnered with Bloomberg Provide mobile data for investors via the Bloomberg App Portal on the Bloomberg Terminal. And it works with Amazon now AWS data exchange and Snowflake to make access to app data also available in other channels. Future partnerships of a similar nature could come into play as another means of differentiating Apptopia’s data from its competitors.
The company declined to offer its current sales rate or rating, but notes that it has tripled its rating from its last fundraiser in late 2019.
In addition to the product expansions, the company plans to use the funds to add another 25 to its 55-strong team in 2021, including in engineering and analysts. And it will expand its management team, adding a CFO, CPO and CMO this year.
To date, Apptopia has raised $ 30 million in debt.
