User acquisition platform Acquired.io has launched with $2m (£1.6m) in funding, aiming to help developers find and acquire high-quality users across dozens of smaller platforms. The company is the latest venture by the founders of mobile marketing company AppScotch, which was acquired by AppAnnie in March 2016.

The platform is designed to help user acquisition (UA) teams manage smaller channels outside Google and Facebook, including Snapchat, AdColony and Chartboost. Acquired.io estimates that the average UA team spends around 80 per cent of their time managing these smaller channels, which often require individual attention despite smaller scale. With the number of channels available to app marketers up from 700 in 2015 to 1,500 this year, the problem is only getting larger.

“The sheer number of apps out there today makes it difficult for companies to get noticed,” said Andrey Kazakov, co-founder and CEO of Acquired.io. “To be able to compete, advertisers need to maintain a wide and diverse portfolio of channels to acquire users, which puts enormous pressure on UA teams.

“Most advertisers have a portfolio of channels they deal with which spans from 10 to 50 channels depending on the company. Constantly discovering ways to acquire users is a part of the day-to-day job for UA teams, adding even more manual operations to their daily work. Our goal is to minimize the unnecessary manual work they face every day.”

The platform currently supports 20 channels, and is set to increase to 50 by the end of the year. In addition to more efficient management, it also enables UA teams to easily discover and test new channels without having to go through a costly and time-consuming set up process. The firm plans to add further automation features in the future to further simplify campaign management.

“Mobile user acquisition, as the market grows, has become some sort of a jungle for most publishers, with hundreds of networks or channels to deal with,” said Mark Zhang, senior vice president of global operations at IGG, one of Acquired.io’s first customers. “While the largest mobile gaming companies have the financial, technical and/or human resources to tackle this problem, most small to medium size publishers end up running mobile campaigns very inefficiently. I’m very excited to see Acquired.io coming up with a first-of-its-kind, one-stop DIY platform to solve this problem at scale.”

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