GetJar, which runs the world’s second largest app store, has closed $11m (£7.4m) in Series B funding from Accel Partners. The company will use the money to develop its consumer-facing website and mobile site (m.getjar.com), including its Pay-Per-Download (PPD), App Download Page (ADP) and App Catalogue Express (ACE) solutions. Accel previously made a $6m investment in GetJar two years ago.
“We doubled down in this Series B due to GetJar’s momentum as the leading open platform in the mobile apps space,” says Accel Partners’ Rich Wong. “Mobile app developers need to get discovered, build a marketing channel for mobile users, and scale to massive user bases. With over 1bn downloads to date, Getjar has led the industry to create this unique, cross-platform app store solution.”
The additional investment comes at a time when GetJar is seeking to aggressively expand its offering on open smartphone platforms such as Android, Blackberry, and Symbian. GetJar notes that in the past year, it 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, despite a challenging economic environment. 
“The app market is exploding across lots of different media,” notes GetJar CMO, Patrick Mork. “We are seeing apps embedded TV sets, tablets and netbook computers, and we are watching all these developments with a lot of interest. We are being approached by all sorts of crazy companies, and while we have made no firm commitments, we are a nimble start-up, so if we see something that makes sense, we will consider it seriously; it’s a very exciting time to be in this space.”
Recent research from Juniper forecasts that the global app market will be worth over $30bn by 2015, with a significant part of this opportunity for publishers coming from multiple platforms. GetJar says it is uniquely positioned to ride this trend, given its open, cross-platform approach to providing consumers with a one-stop destination to find everything they want on any handset, regardless of platform.
