GetJar Secures $25m, Commits to Android
- Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
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GetJar has secured $25m (£15.5m) in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management. Accel Partners, which provided its series A and B rounds, will also participate in the series C funding. GetJar says the funds will be used for “continued innovations in its market approach and to support its rapid growth by expanding sales, marketing and engineering initiatives”.
As the battle between open versus closed ecosystems continues, GetJar says it plans to aggressively expand its offering to Android publishers in order to secure its position as the premier open Android Market alternative, while continuing to support other smartphone platforms such as Blackberry and iOS.
In the past year, GetJar has established partnerships with key players such as Yahoo!, Sprint, AT&T, Openwave, Angry Birds developer Rovio, Zynga and Glu Mobile, quadrupling the number of downloads per month and significantly extending its global reach. This growth has led GetJar to triple its number of employees and expand its operations in Europe.
“GetJar has the rare combination of a differentiated, cross-platform app store solution, coupled with a unique revenue model,” says Lee Fixel, managing director at Tiger Global Management. “We’ve been highly impressed with the leadership team and their ability to disrupt the marketplace with the fraction of spend compared to the likes of Google and others. I’m very excited to see what GetJar will do next with our investment during this tremendous growth period.”
In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2bn in 2010 to $15bn in 2011, and keep growing to reach $58bn by 2014. In addition, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7bn, with 81 per cent of those being free.