GetJar (www.getjar.com), the world’s largest open app store with over 1.5 billion downloads to date, has raised USD25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management. Accel Partners, which provided its series A and B rounds, will also participate in the series C funding.
The new capital will be applied to continued innovations in its market approach and to support its rapid growth by expanding sales, marketing and engineering initiatives.
As the battle between open versus closed ecosystems continues, GetJar plans to aggressively expand its offering to Android publishers in order to secure its position as the premier “open” Android Market alternative while continuing to support other smartphone platforms such as Blackberry and IOS. In the past year, GetJar has established partnerships with key players such as Yahoo!, Sprint, AT&T, Openwave, Rovio (developer of Angry Birds), Zynga and Glu Mobile, quadrupling the number of downloads per month and significantly extending its global reach. This growth has led GetJar to triple their number of employees and expand its operations in Europe.
The news comes at a time when GetJar has received much external recognition – most notably, the company was named 2011 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum for being an innovative company whose approach to technology will have a deep impact on business and society.
“GetJar has the rare combination of a differentiated, cross platform app store solution coupled with a unique revenue model,” says Lee Fixel, Managing Director at Tiger Global Management. “We’ve been highly impressed with the leadership team and their ability to disrupt the marketplace with the fraction of spend compared to the likes of Google and others. I’m very excited to see what GetJar will do next with our investment during this tremendous growth period.”
In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from USD5.2 billion last year to USD15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding USD58 billion by 2014. In addition, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion, with 81 per cent of those being free, while mobile advertising is expected to grow nicely over time into a multi-billion dollar market. As the world’s largest open app store GetJar is uniquely positioned to excel in this space.
