YouAppi, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a Big Data-driven solution for mobile marketing, has raised $13.1 million from an international consortium of investors, including Ukraine’s Digital Future.
Also participating in this Series B round are Click Ventures, Emery Capital (Russia), Global Brain (Japan) and Hawk Ventures (USA), Israeli funds Glilot Capital Partners and 2B Angels, as well as AltaIR Capital and Flint Capital, two funds operating essentially from Russia and Israel.
Flint, Glilot and 2B Angels had already put $3 million in YouAppi in October 2014.
The funding will be used to enhance YouAppi’s products and accelerate growth in China, Japan and other growth markets, while moving the company’s headquarters to San Francisco.
Initially based between Israel and New York, the startup also has offices in Beijing, Berlin and London.
Launched in 2012, YouAppi “enables the world’s leading apps to find the right customers at the right conversion price across countries and verticals, based on post-install event analytics.” Its proprietary predictive algorithms can “analyze the usage habits of 1.5 billion users of 3,500 mobile apps and sites.” These include The New York Times, Pandora, EA, Orbitz, Zynga, Yandex, Wayfair, and Viber in 200 countries via 100 billion impressions monthly, the startup claims.
In Asia, YouAppi works with Baidu, UC Union (Alibaba Mobile Business Group), Sungy Mobile, Apus, NewBornTown, Kika and Bandai Namco, as well as global YouAppi clients. The company expects its Chinese revenue to double in 2016 from 10% to 20% of its global revenue.
“The YouAppi technology has an impressive ability to hit the ground running and deliver strong user acquisition numbers for native Chinese apps at or below the price point set by the app’s marketing team. Most foreign companies have a steep learning curve in China, but YouAppi succeeded immediately upon launching their first few native Chinese apps,” said Jin Shanghao, Venture Partner at Hawk Ventures.
Digital Future was launched in 2014 by Oleksii Vitchenko, a figure of the Ukrainian innovation scene. In January this year, the fund invested €200,000 in PDNA, a Ukrainian startup which develops projects in the field of symbiotic artificial intelligence.
