Application analytics company App Annie has purchased mobile measurement company Mobidia, in a transaction that closed Friday and expands App Annie’s geographic reach, workforce and portfolio.
App Annie serves as an aggregator of app-store data and app rankings, providing developers with some free information on their own apps as well as premium services that involve the purchase of broader data so that they can “better understand the market, what is happening outside their own apps, and where competitors are going,” according to Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie. The company said that more than 700,000 apps leverage its analytics, and it publishes a monthly app index that tracks trends within the app ecosystem.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Schmitt told RCR Wireless News that the purchase was made with a combination of equity and cash. This is App Annie’s second purchase in the past year; the company raised $55 million in venture capital during a funding round that closed in early January with the expectation that the funds would be used for potential acquisitions, international expansion and product development. App Annie bought mobile analytics company Distimo in 2014 and saw significant growth last year in its user base (75% year-over-year), its revenue (tripled year-over-year) and its workforce (doubled year-over-year).
Schmitt said that Mobidia, which has been tracking mobile usage data since its founding in 2012, is a “very complementary technology” that will provide more data insight for App Annie users. App Annie takes on 30 employees from Mobidia, and Mobidia’s headquarters in Vancouver will become App Annie’s 12th office and first in Canada.
In an e-mail sent this morning, Schmitt said that integrating Mobidia’s data with App Annie’s provides “the largest and most comprehensive app usage data product available on the market” and that the company will now have data on app-related reach and engagement across 60 countries.
“At the end of the day, our clients don’t care too much about how we get to the data,” Schmitt told RCR. “But they want to have the most reliable data and the biggest country coverage.”
App Annie has been trialing its new Usage Intelligence offering since January, in addition to its standing Store Intelligence and Audience Intelligence offerings. Usage Intelligence moves out of its beta release today as well.
“Five years ago, when I co-founded App Annie, there was almost no meaningful insight into who was using apps and how they were using them,” Schmitt commented in a blog post on the acquisition. He added that “we realized early on that usage tracking would become an essential component for developers – thus, the introduction of Usage Intelligence to complement our Store Intelligence and Audience Intelligence offerings. Combining Mobidia’s data with ours accelerates the development of Usage Intelligence, allowing us to provide [customers] with the largest app-usage dataset and the deepest insight into the 2 billion smartphone users worldwide.”
