The boom in mobile apps continues to open up new opportunities for mobile application development services, a market which is expected to grow to $ 100 billion by 2015 by one estimate. The latest to ride that growth wave is Apsalar, a mobile analytics and behavioral targeting platform that just raised $ 5 million in its latest round of funding.
Apsalar’s round is being funded by Thomvest Ventures, Battery Ventures, DN Capital and existing investors. Apsalar previously raised $ 800,000 in seed funding in late 2010 from 500 Startups, Mark Goines, Morado Venture Partners, Founder’s Co-op and Seraph Group. The company plans to use the money to expand its product portfolio and build up its sales and marketing efforts.
San Francisco-based Apsalar sells itself as an advanced mobile analytics tool that can not only help developers understand what users are doing in their apps, but also allows devs to target specific groups of users and deliver personalized content to them. Apsalar’s service includes a dashboard that allows developers to make quick cross-application comparisons and helps them build deeper engagement with users. The freemium service competes against companies like Flurry.
Apsalar co-founder and CEO Michael Oiknine — who previously sold Kefta, a SaaS provider of online behavioral targeting solutions, to Acxiom — said the company is addressing a pain point for developers and publishers, who are looking for better ways to target users and gain more value from them. The company also hired Anton Commissaris, a former founding member of Mint.com’s executive team, as Apsalar’s chief revenue officer.
As I wrote earlier, with mobile applications booming and expected to bring in $ 58 billion by 2014, there are a lot of ways to sell services to the developers and publishers building apps. Apsalar is wading into the analytics side of the market, but there’s also plenty of opportunities around app creation, maintenance, monetization, analytics, distribution and extension services.
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