GetJar, the world’s second largest app store, has closed USD11m in series B funding from Accel Partners.
The company plans to apply the new capital to developing its consumer facing sites (GetJar.com and m.getjar.com) and its customer solutions such as Pay-Per-Download, App Download Page and App Catalogue Express in order to fuel its traffic growth.
GetJar is seeking to expand its offering on “open” smartphone platforms such as Android, Blackberry and Symbian.
In the past year, GetJar has tripled the number of employees, quadrupled the number of downloads per month, signed partnerships with key players such as Sprint and maintained its profitability.
"We doubled down in this series B due to GetJar’s momentum as the leading open platform in the mobile apps space," says Rich Wong (pictured) at Accel Partners. "Mobile app developers need to get discovered, build a marketing channel for mobile users, and scale to massive user bases. With over one billion downloads to date, Getjar has led the industry to create this unique, cross platform app store solution.”
“It’s hard to believe that six guys that set-up the first beta testing community for mobile app developers would eventually transform into the world’s second largest app store with over 1 billion downloads to date,” says Ilja Laurs, founder and chief executive of GetJar. “We look forward to our continued partnership with Accel Partners and this new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development."
Research recently released by Juniper forecasts that the global app market will be worth over USD30bn by 2015 with a significant part of this opportunity for publishers coming from multiple platforms.
