AppsFlyer raises $7.1M so your app won’t get buried alive in the app stores

It’s easy for an app to get lost in the app stores with a million other competitors. Israel’s AppsFlyer has raised $7.1 million in funding to address that exact problem.

App makers typically run aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns to promote their apps and find the users they need. AppsFlyer provides these folks with data on mobile app measurement, user attribution, and analytics from their apps — meaning app makers can tweak their campaigns and get more bang for their buck.

The Tel Aviv-based startup monitors the results of mobile advertising campaigns and tells developers, brands, and agencies who are promoting an app just how good their results are.

The money came from Pitango Venture Capital and Magma Venture Partners.

The company’s 1,000 clients include Sega, Alawar, Foursquare, Baidu, and Mail.ru. With AppsFlyer’s NativeTrack technology, those companies can do a better job calculating the lifetime value of a customer and how much it can afford to profitably spend in attracting new users for an app.

Oren Kaniel, chief executive of AppsFlyer, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the new funding will help the company scale globally. He said the company plays an important role as an unbiased source of measurement of all media sources for mobile user acquisition. It can measure paid, organic, viral, and social marketing results.

“We are like a one-stop shop for mobile marketing,” Kaniel said.

AppsFlyer said that the traffic for its mobile clients grew 80 times in 2013. The company now monitors $500 million in mobile ad spending and is tracking mobile app installations at a run rate of $1 billion each year. The company said it is profitable. It is integrated with more than 300 ad networks and media sources, and it is one of a dozen partners for Facebook’s Mobile Measurement program.

This sector moves into the spotlight a few weeks ago after Facebook stopped giving user data to two of AppsFlyer’s rivals, HasOffers and Kontagent, because those competitors held onto Facebook’s user data longer than was permitted.

Kaniel, a former software engineer at Intel and Avaya, started the company in 2011 and shipped its first product in January 2012.

“This is the exact vision I had since starting,” he said.

“I was surprised that, after talking to developers, [they felt] mobile advertising was so broken. There was no way to measure it.”

AppsFlyer has now opened offices in New York and San Francisco. Rivals include AD-X, Apsalar, Kochava, HasOffers, and Kontagent. Kaniel said his company can set itself apart by being unbiased.

Customers adopt AppsFlyer’s software development kit. The developer, brand, or agency then configures their app promotional campaign using traceable links. They launch the app marketing campaign and track all marketing events, including installations and post-download conversions, return on investment, average revenue per user per campaign, and lifetime value. Then, they use the AppsFlyer dashboard to optimize the app marketing campaign to increase installations and revenue while minimizing the costs of the campaign.

Eitan Bek, general partner at Pitango Venture Capital, will join AppsFlyer’s board. To date, the company has raised $8 million.

“The industry is in need of a reliable mobile ad tracking platform that will allow advertisers to optimize their marketing budgets based on real results,” said Modi Rosen, partner at Magma Venture Partners, in a statement on the news.

“Back in 2012, we invested in AppsFlyer’s vision of becoming the mobile advertiser’s toolbox. After AppsFlyer significantly exceeded all expectations in 2013 and into 2014, we’re excited to join this round of funding.”