Mobile analytics firm Flurry has raised a $12.5 million round of funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The money comes from venture capital firms that include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Interwest Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Menlo Ventures, according to the filing. Flurry confirmed that it raised the amount, but it did not identify the investors yet.
The company works with 125,000 companies (most of them app and game developers). And more than 400,000 apps use Flurry’s analytics, with another 20,000 signing up every months.
The San Francisco company has always been strong in analytics for mobile apps and games, but it is building upon the big data knowledge and insight that it gets from those numbers. Earlier this year, Flurry launched an exchange dubbed Flurry Marketplace for its mobile advertising platform so that it can match the right advertisers with the right content publishers. The advertisers can offer bids to buy ads in real time and target the exact audience they want to reach.
Flurry gathers information on more than 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets each month. It captures over 1.3 trillion actions that those consumers perform in those apps each month, so it has a treasure trove of data that is useful to advertisers. With the new Flurry Marketplace, the company has created an exchange where advertisers and content publishers can team up to target ads at intended audiences in an automated, programmatic fashion.
Market research IDC predicts that real-time bidding (RTB) ad spending will top $13 billion by 2016. With such marketplaces, ad buyers can set bids on the ad impressions, or how much they will pay for their ads to be shown to audiences that meet certain thresholds, such as 18- to 34-year-old women who enjoy role-playing games. The dynamic market determines the best price for the transaction in order to maximize the return on investment for both the advertiser and publisher. Publishers can set a floor price to protect the value of their inventory from racing to the bottom.
Flurry has raised $62.5 million to date and it has 150 employees.