GetJar, said to be the world’s second largest app store, today announced it has closed $11 million in Series B funding from Accel Partners. The company plans to apply the new capital to continued development on its consumer facing sites, its customer solutions such as Pay-Per-Download (PPD), App Download Page (ADP) and App Catalogue Express (ACE) in order to fuel its rapid traffic growth.
As the battle between Open vs. Closed ecosystems between Apple and Google becomes clearly drawn, the additional investment is said to come at a time when GetJar is seeking to aggressively expand its offering on “open” smartphone platforms such as Android, Blackberry, and Symbian. In the past year, GetJar 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.
“We doubled down in this Series B due to GetJar’s momentum as the leading open platform in the mobile apps space,” said Rich Wong at Accel Partners. “Mobile app developers need to get discovered, build a marketing channel for mobile users, and scale to massive user bases. With over 1 Billion downloads to date, Getjar has led the industry to create this unique, cross platform app store solution.”
“Getjar has made incredible progress over the past four years from a startup coming out of Vilnius, Lithuania to become a major player in the open mobile industry,” said Kevin Comolli at Accel Partners. “We are proud about our continued investment with them during this pivotal growth phase.”
“It’s hard to believe that six guys that set-up the first beta testing community for mobile app developers would eventually transform into the world’s 2nd largest app store with over 1 billion downloads to date,” said Ilja Laurs, Founder and CEO of GetJar. “We look forward to our continued partnership with Accel Partners and this new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development.”