Shazam has closed a $30m (£19.9m) funding round, valuing the company, known for its music recognition app, at over $1bn.

This figure has doubled in less than a year, as a $20m funding round last March valued Shazams at $500m.

Shazam is only the fifth tech company from the UK to achieve a £1bn valuation, following in the footsteps of Wonga, Monitise, Zoopla and Powa Technologies.

“Shazams valuation displays the potential that apps have,” comments Olivier Bernard, VP EMEA at mobile app analytics firm App Annie. “It is a sector ripe for growth. To stand out from the crowd in the busy app marketplace, businesses must invest in understanding how users interact on their app and what their competitors are doing, so they can react accordingly.

“Shazam is a prime example of a company that has catered towards what its users want, delivering a service that has kept it consistently in the top 40 apps in both the UK and the US over the past four years.”

Shazam was founded as a text service in 1999; by 2014, the monthly active users of its app had passed 100m. The latest set of figures the company released publicly, for H2 2013, showed a net loss of £5.8m, against revenues of £16.9m.