App Annie Partners with Sequoia Capital, Raises $15 Million

SAN FRANCISCO and BEIJING, Sept. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- App Annie, the leading business intelligence and market data platform for the app economy, today announced it has closed a $15 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital's US fund, with participation from existing investors IDG Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners, e.ventures and Infinity Venture Partners. This latest round of funding comes in the wake of explosive demand for App Annie's business intelligence platform, with the company doubling its user base and tripling its monthly recurring revenues over the last 12 months. Funds from the round will be used to accelerate App Annie's product development, grow its sales and marketing headquarters in San Francisco and expand its global offices across Asia and Europe. Tim Lee, Partner at Sequoia Capital's Silicon Valley office, and Alan Gould, CEO of uSamp, will be joining App Annie's Board of Directors.

With global smartphone shipments expected to surpass one billion this year, the app and digital content economy is seeing tremendous growth. This has led enterprises to rethink how they monetize content and approach global content distribution. App Annie's business intelligence platform, comprised of Analytics, Store Stats and Intelligence, has become the industry standard for informing strategic decisions from monitoring the competition, to deciding on new markets to enter, to creating key performance indicators for a product or company. Today, more than 90% of the Top 100 iOS app publishers by revenue rely on App Annie products, and some of our customers include Google, Microsoft and Tencent, to name a few.

"App Annie's products are a must-have for anyone in the mobile industry. We at Sequoia Capital have been using their tools for years to help identify breakout startups," said Tim Lee. "With a seasoned management team, a world-class product development center and an extremely loyal customer base, App Annie is well-positioned to become the gold standard for analytics in this new digital economy."

"When we started App Annie, we had a clear belief that apps were going to completely change the content distribution model, which meant we had an opportunity to reinvent how companies analyzed and extracted useful insights for business use," said Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie. "We've done that, our growing customer base shows it and we're very thankful to them. While we could have easily raised a larger round, our efficient business model gave us the flexibility to take less, which is a testament to our products and the team we've built. For us, Sequoia Capital is not only an investor, but also a partner and advisor that will help us accelerate our plans to expand our platform so that all companies can understand the global app and digital content ecosystem."

In preparation for the growth to be fueled by this venture round, App Annie is also strengthening its board with the addition of industry veteran Alan Gould, CEO, uSamp. "Creating a market data and business intelligence platform that allows companies to extract actionable insights around what consumers are doing on their digital devices is the holy grail of the mobile industry, and App Annie is already delivering results. I'm excited to help them take the company to the next level," said Gould.

Tim Lee
Tim is a partner at Sequoia Capital where he works with mobile, cloud and software companies. Prior to Sequoia he worked at Google, where he managed European marketing and product launch strategy. While at Google, he also conceived the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Earlier, Tim worked at McKinsey & Company in London and at microprocessor IP company, ARM, in Cambridge, UK. Tim has a Master's in Electrical and Information Engineering from Cambridge University, and an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Alan Gould
Prior to uSamp, Alan founded IAG Research, the leading provider of engagement metrics in the television industry. He served as its co-CEO until the company was acquired by Nielsen for $250 million. Following the company's merger with Nielsen, Alan created and served as CEO of Advertiser Solutions, a business unit of The Nielsen Company that provides end-to-end marketing solutions to large and global advertisers. Alan is a Venture Partner with Greycroft and has previously served on the board of directors of CrowdComputing Systems, Netsertive, and VIZU, which was acquired by Nielsen in 2012.  Alan is a graduate of the New York University School of Law (J.D.), Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (M.P.P.), and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (B.S.F.S.).

About App Annie
App Annie is reinventing business intelligence products for the apps and digital goods economy. App Annie data and products are the industry standard, used by over 90 percent of the Top 100 grossing iOS publishers. More than 300,000 apps rely daily on App Annie Analytics to track their downloads, revenues, rankings and reviews. The company is tracking more downloads and revenues than any other app store market data company, to date over 25 billion downloads and more than US $6 billion in app store revenues. App Annie is a privately held global company of more than 110 employees with offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Seoul, and Tokyo.  For more information, please visit http://www.appannie.com/, check out our blog, and follow @AppAnnie on Twitter.

About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital helps founders turn imaginative ideas into enduring companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs," the Sequoia team has worked closely with legendary founders such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner of Cisco, David Filo and Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube, and Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn. Sequoia is now helping the next generation of innovators build the lasting companies of tomorrow. www.sequoiacap.com

SOURCE App Annie