App Annie announces Eric Liaw to its Board after closing $55m Series D funding round led by IVP

– USA, CA – App Annie, the leading decision-making platform for the mobile app economy, today announced the launch of Usage Intelligence, an industry-first means of providing mobile executives with exclusive active user and engagement trends across thousands of apps worldwide. Along with this breakthrough product, the company closed an oversubscribed $55 million Series D funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greycroft Partners and IDG Capital Partners.

The announcement comes during a period of immense growth for App Annie. In 2014 alone, the company tripled its revenues, more than doubled its team to 300 employees across 10 global offices, acquired mobile analytics expert Distimo, and grew its active user base by 75 percent year-over-year to over 350,000 mobile leaders, marketers and developers, making App Annie the largest app business community in the world. The new injection of capital will be used to invest in product development, accelerate international expansion and fund potential M&A activity.

In conjunction with the new financing, App Annie will be bringing Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP, onto its Board of Directors. IVP has invested in a host of leading mobile and B2B tech companies including AppDynamics, Datalogix, Marketo, Shazam, Snapchat, Supercell, and Twitter and over 100 IVP portfolio companies have gone public.

About Usage Intelligence

App Annie’s new Usage Intelligence product enables the analysis of how the world’s top apps are being used – providing for the first time mission-critical metrics such as active users (MAU, WAU, DAU), time spent, usage frequency and retention for competitive and market analysis.

“We see so much pent-up demand from everyone in the mobile industry for this type of information. Usage data is of paramount importance to mobile app publishers and investors, particularly when you are talking about analyzing apps that monetize outside of the store,” Bertrand Schmitt, co-founder and CEO of App Annie, said of the Usage Intelligence launch. “Everyone in the app ecosystem, including the world’s most successful app publishers, marketers and investors have been asking us to deliver this type of intelligence, so you can imagine how excited we are to bring this product to market. It’s a big deal for the mobile app industry.”

The new data extends the capabilities of App Annie Intelligence, the company’s premium market data product that can analyze the downloads, revenues, audience and now usage of the world’s top apps. Intelligence is uniquely built upon the aggregation, anonymization and analysis of billions of app data footprints, producing the most accurate and granular market data available for mobile apps. The product is built using cutting-edge technology, with  aggregation, analysis, visualization, and multi-platform accessibility (web, mobile, API) baked in. The result is a product that is trusted throughout the mobile app industry. Trusted data from App Annie Intelligence was used in the earnings releases of sixteen publicly traded companies for 3Q 2014, and Intelligence customers represent nearly half of mobile app store revenues globally.

About App Annie’s Series D Financing

“Mobile apps continue to proliferate and are transforming travel, transportation, health, gaming, entertainment, financial services and just about every industry you can think of, but before App Annie the app ecosystem was largely flying blind,” said Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP. “App Annie provides actionable insight into this explosive sector of technology and as a result, they are the ubiquitous standard for the app industry. We have been a happy customer for some time, and we understand App Annie’s value first-hand, which makes it even more exciting to partner with them and become shareholders in a truly global company.”

“The worlds of mobile technology, analytics and big data are truly colliding and we’re building a new kind of intelligence platform for the mobile app economy,” said Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie. “We’re thrilled to bring on IVP as they genuinely share our vision of informing every decision made within the global app community. 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.”

About App Annie

App Annie is the #1 decision-making platform for the mobile app economy. App Annie combines the analytics of one’s own apps with a granular understanding of the competition and market to provide a unique 360 degree view of one’s mobile business.  The App Annie platform is relied upon by over 90 percent of the top 100 publishers and more than 675,000 apps, including the likes of Electronic Arts, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Nexon, Nestle, Samsung, Tencent and Universal Studios. The company has tracked over 79 billion downloads and more than US $24 billion in gross revenues to date, the industry leader by far. App Annie is a privately held global company of more than 300 employees headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Amsterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Moscow, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo. The company is backed by leading venture investors including Greycroft Partners, IDG Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital with $94 million raised to date.

About Institutional Venture Partners (IVP)

With $4 billion of committed capital, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States.  Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in over 300 companies, 101 of which have gone public.  IVP is one of the top-performing firms in the industry and has a 34-year IRR of 43.2%.  IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. IVP investments include such notable companies as AppDynamics, ArcSight (HPQ), Buddy Media (CRM), ComScore (SCOR), Datalogix, Dropbox, Dropcam (GOOG), Fleetmatics (FLTX), HomeAway (AWAY), Kayak (PCLN), LegalZoom, LifeLock (LOCK), Marketo (MKTO), MySQL (ORCL), ngmoco (DeNA), OnDeck (ONDK), Pure Storage, RetailMeNot (SALE), Shazam, Snapchat, Supercell, Synchronoss (SNCR), The Honest Company, Twitter (TWTR), and Zynga (ZNGA). 

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