App Annie, a software company that collects and deciphers data about the use of more than 1 million mobile apps, has closed a $63 million late-stage round of debt and equity financing. The investment, led by new backer Greenspring Associates, boosts total funding to $157 million. App Annie won’t discuss its valuation.
The six-year-old organization has also added a prominent new board member, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, who was picked for his experience in helping a cloud software company go public. “A pioneer in the [software-as-a-service] space, he is a strategic leader, personable charismatic, and will help us elevate App Annie to the next stage of growth,” App Annie CEO and co-founder Bertrand Schmitt, said in a statement.
The new funding and expanded board structure comes on the heels of several strategic executive hires including chief financial officer Mark Vranesh (previously with games developer Zynga), chief revenue officer Ted Krantz (who boasts experience with SAP and Oracle), and senior vice president of research Danielle Levitas (a former analyst with tech research firm IDC).
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The moves suggest App Annie is preparing for an initial public offering in the not-so-distant future, but during an interview with Coins2Day to discuss the funding, Schmitt stayed quiet about the company’s intentions.
“We have not said anything about that. We’re focused on building a sustainable business, and making sure that we do everything right for the long term,” he said.
The new money is primarily intended for research and development, and international expansion. Currently, App Annie’s revenue split is pretty evenly, with about half of its sales coming from outside the United States. (It has 15 offices and 425 employees worldwide.) How influential is the company? The App Annie platform is used by 94 of the top 100 mobile app publishers.
WATCH: How Americans use mobile apps.
San Francisco-based App Annie offers two primary services: a free trends report that ranks mobile software and detailed paid insights. It closed an oversubscribed, Series D round in January 2015. The company’s other backers include e.Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.
App Annie’s competitors include Flurry, which was bought by Yahoo in July 2014, and Mixpanel, which has so far raised about $76.5 million.
