AppsFlyer raises $56M to deliver measurement innovation

By Oren Kaniel

In 2017, businesses around the world will spend over $1 trillion in marketing. It has never been a better time to be a marketer, who now have more channels and opportunities for engaging customers and prospects than ever before. At the same time, marketing measurement solutions have not kept up and marketers are struggling with outdated tools.

Every dollar spent in marketing should deliver measurable results.

Measure everything is the vision behind our $56 million Series C funding round, thanks to our new investors – Qumra Capital, Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and Pitango Growth, and to our current investors – Eight Roads Ventures, Magma Ventures and Pitango Venture Partners.

Thank you for placing your trust in our team at AppsFlyer.

I would like to share some personal insight into our journey to date and some insights into where we are going.

Looking back

We founded AppsFlyer because marketers lacked the basic tools to measure and improve the impact of their mobile marketing investments.
NativeTrack™ provided marketers with answers to questions such as: “What drove this user action?,” and “How long did these users stay active in my app?” These insights formed the basis of the mobile attribution industry.
Early feedback from marketers and partners was incredible. We doubled down on product development, introducing new capabilities and innovations including LTV (lifetime value) reporting, OneLink™ universal deep linking, sophisticated API’s, raw data exports, cost and ROI reporting, multi-touch attribution, fraud prevention, and TV attribution.
Marketers struggled to maintain multiple marketing SDKs, so we created The AppsFlyer Universal SDK.
As business grew, we opened twelve new global offices to facilitate local support to our clients, partners and help evolve the local mobile marketing industry.
As mobile usage grew, new innovations became possible including DeviceRank™ and Active Fraud Insights, Universal Uninstall Attribution, Custom Dashboards, Data Locker, and Ad Revenue Attribution.

Within the first few weeks following every major product launch, marketers reached out to share how our innovations helped them realize substantial revenues or cost savings. To quote a recent email: “I don’t know how my team could have done this without you.” This focus on bottom-line impact has always, and continues to drive our R&D efforts.

The view from the lead

As our market share grew, we recognized that being the attribution authority comes with responsibility.

For example, in 2016 AppsFlyer measured approximately $6B in mobile ad spend. Whether this means taking a stand on fraud, or helping to set industry standards for complex issues such as attribution lookback windows, this is a responsibility we take seriously.

In 2016, marketers and businesses partnering with AppsFlyer generated over $30 billion in funding, exits, IPOs and M&As. This number reflects the trust that the world’s leading marketers, businesses and investors have placed in AppsFlyer.

As the CMO of a large company recently told me, “AppsFlyer is my ace in the hole, the secret sauce in my marketing tech stack.” This trust in our insights is why over 80% of businesses looking for a mobile attribution provider chose AppsFlyer.

Looking forward

As mobile increasingly becomes the lens through which both customers and marketers interact, the team at AppsFlyer will continue with to build on our core values:

We will remain unbiased and independent. This is why we selected financial investors with long-term vision.
Because we believe app usage data is one of the most important assets businesses have:
- We work hard to protect our clients’ mobile app data; keeping it 100% private, safe, and secure. This is why we maintain our SOC2 compliance.
- We believe that our customer data belongs to our clients. We will never use it for targeting or profiling.
- Every action we take should be in the interest of our clients, and never in conflict.
We will continue to explore new avenues for data-driven insights, including broader measurement capabilities and deeper, AI-driven insights and sophisticated analytics.
We will maintain AppsFlyer as an open platform, allowing 3rd party developers to add services on top of the AppsFlyer platform. Our partners can rest assured that we value our relationships and will continue to empower and support your businesses for the long road ahead.
AppsFlyer’s clients have a clear advantage in the market. We will continue to work hard to broaden the gap and make our clients even more successful.

A special thanks to…

Our Clients – Thank you for your trust, your partnership and your feedback. We will continue to listen and innovate together, developing solutions that will help you build for success in competitive markets.
Our Investors – Thanks for dreaming big with us.
The AppsFlyer Team – We have the best team in the world. I am so proud of you and your work. I will continue to do my best to recruit the best talent and make this the ride of a lifetime. All in!
Our Partners – Thank you for seeing the value in transparent mobile measurement and for helping our clients grow their mobile businesses.
Friends and Families – Thank you for letting us dream, for believing in us and the support you provide so we can recognize our dreams.

We hope this great news is just the beginning for AppsFlyer in 2017. We can’t wait until you see what else this year has in store!