GetJar, the largest open app store, announced Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management with participation from A and B round investor Accel Partners. Accel led the company’s $11 million Series B in June 2010 and an unknown sized Series A in November 2007.The announcement comes at an interesting time. Apple just announced last month that its App Store had hit 10 billion downloads since launching in 2008. At the same time, all trends point to Android becoming even more of a force to be reckoned with in 2011. Either way, the mobile landscape is exploding.
Second only to the Apple App Store, GetJar claims to be the largest “open” app store, with over 1.5 billion downloads to date. The company has tapped these massive numbers by providing applications for feature phones and smartphones running any platform–Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.–instead of just targeting one single market.
Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. with offices in the UK and Lithuania, GetJar offers over 65,000 mobile applications to consumers in more than 200 countries.
In the press release for the funding, GetJar cites a report by market research firm Gartner that sees global mobile app store revenues swelling from $5.2 billion in 2010 to $15 billion in 2011 to $58 billion by 2014. If that’s true (and it isn’t hard to believe), then it explains quite a few things. Like how a service that’s essentially an app aggregator for multiple platforms has managed to raise around $40 million in three short years. Or why Apple is so aggressive about controlling the content and structure of its app store.
Gartner also estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion. Mobile advertising will only grow more and more prominent, since 81 percent of those apps will be free to download.
GetJar says the new capital will be used to continue innovating as well as to support its growing sales, marketing and engineering initiatives.
