App Annie Bets on Southeast Asia, India to Capture Phone Surge
- Startup raised $63 million to expand in newly emergent markets
- Asian app spending will dwarf rest of the world by 2020
Passengers use smartphones next to a charging station at a railway station in Mumbai. The surging number of mobile devices and people going online through apps for the first time are fueling Asia’s mobile software arena.
Photographer: DHIRAJ SINGH/BloombergA Singaporean shophouse may seem an unlikely symbol of Asia’s mobile boom. Yet one muggy evening in March, about a hundred people packed App Annie Ltd.’s new and larger offices to mark its plan to capture data on millions of new smartphone users.
The startup will triple staffing at its office in Singapore to 25 people this year as it targets new customers in India and Southeast Asia for the data it compiles on apps, how often they are used and the revenue generated. That’s being bankrolled by a recent $63 million funding, which also helped pay for the soiree attended by executives from the industry’s biggest names: Google Inc., Sequoia Capital and Zalora among them.