GetJar Secures $11 Million in Series B Funding From Accel Partners

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GetJar (www.getjar.com), the world’s second largest app store, today announced it has closed $11 million in Series B funding from Accel Partners. The company plans to apply the new capital to continued innovations on its consumer facing sites (GetJar.com and m.getjar.com), its unique customer solutions such as Pay-Per-Download (PPD), App Download Page (ADP) and App Catalogue Express (ACE) in order to fuel its rapid traffic growth.

“We look forward to our continued partnership with Accel Partners and this new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development.”

As the battle between Open vs. Closed ecosystems between Apple and Google becomes clearly drawn, the additional investment comes at a time when GetJar seeks to aggressively expand its offering on “open” smartphone platforms such as Android, Blackberry, and Symbian. In the past year, GetJar has tripled the number of employees, quadrupled the number of downloads per month, signed partnerships with key players such as Sprint and maintained its profitability despite a challenging economic environment.

“We doubled down in this Series B due to GetJar’s momentum as the leading open platform in the mobile apps space,” said Rich Wong at Accel Partners. “Mobile app developers need to get discovered, build a marketing channel for mobile users, and scale to massive user bases. With over 1 Billion downloads to date, GetJar has led the industry to create this unique, cross platform app store solution.”

“GetJar has made incredible progress over the past four years from a startup coming out of Vilnius, Lithuania to become a major player in the open mobile industry,” said Kevin Comolli at Accel Partners. “We are proud about our continued investment with them during this pivotal growth phase.”

“It’s hard to believe that six guys that set-up the first beta testing community for mobile app developers would eventually transform into the world’s 2^nd largest app store with over 1 billion downloads to date,” said Ilja Laurs, Founder and CEO of GetJar. “We look forward to our continued partnership with Accel Partners and this new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development."

Research recently released by Juniper forecasts that the global app market will be worth over $30 billion by 2015 with a significant part of this opportunity for publishers coming from multiple platforms. GetJar is uniquely positioned to ride this trend given its open, cross platform approach to providing consumers with a one-stop “Walmart-type” destination to find everything they want on any handset regardless of platform.

About GetJar

GetJar is the world’s second largest apps store, second only to the Apple App Store, with over 1 billion downloads to date. The company’s key point of difference is its open market approach, which allows it to deliver applications for both feature phones and smartphones across all major platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian among others. The company provides more than 65,000 mobile applications to consumers in more than 200 countries. In 2009 GetJar won the Meffy, Tiecon50 and Mobile Excellence awards for its achievements and products. GetJar is backed by Accel Partners and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the UK and Lithuania. For more information: www.getjar.com and follow us on Twitter @getjar.

About Accel Partners

Founded in 1983, Accel Partners is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class companies. With over $6 billion under management, Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful category-defining companies including: Admob, Alfresco, Arrowpoint, Baidu, BBN, Brightcove, ComScore, Etsy, Facebook, Focus Media, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, JBoss, Kayak, Macromedia, metroPCS, Portal Software, QlikTech, Raptr, Real Networks, Redback Networks, Riverbed, Sohu.com, SunRun, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, XenSource, and Zimbra and others. For more information, visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com.