Open app store GetJar has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management.
Accel Partners, which provided its series A and B rounds, will also participate in the series C funding.
The company said the extra money will be applied to continued innovations in its market approach and to support its growth by expanding sales, marketing and engineering initiatives.
As the battle between open versus closed ecosystems continues, GetJar plans to expand its offering to Android publishers in order to secure its position as the premier “open” Android Market alternative while continuing to support other smartphone platforms such as Blackberry and IOS.
In the past year, GetJar has established partnerships with key players such as Yahoo!, Sprint, AT&T, Openwave, Rovio (developer of Angry Birds), Zynga and Glu Mobile, quadrupling the number of downloads per month and significantly extending its global reach.
This growth has led GetJar to triple their number of employees and expand its operations in Europe.
“GetJar has the rare combination of a differentiated, cross platform app store solution coupled with a unique revenue model,” said Lee Fixel, Managing Director at Tiger Global Management. “We’ve been highly impressed with the leadership team and their ability to disrupt the marketplace with the fraction of spend compared to the likes of Google and others. I’m very excited to see what GetJar will do next with our investment during this tremendous growth period.”
“It’s extraordinary that with hard work and an amazing team, GetJar has become the world’s largest open app store with over 1.5 billion downloads,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and CEO of GetJar. “I was excited to receive such incredible interest for this Series C round of funding and thrilled to add Tiger Global Management to our current investor base. I look forward to rapidly scaling the company to take advantage of the enormous global app market opportunity.”
In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding $58 billion by 2014.
In addition, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion, with 81 percent of those being free, while mobile advertising is expected to grow nicely over time into a multi-billion dollar market. As the world’s largest open app store GetJar is uniquely positioned to excel in this space.
GetJar Networks Limited was represented in the investment by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.
www.getjar.com