Israel’s ironSource Raises $85M to Bolster Mobile App, Software Distribution Power

One area that Israel’s tech scene has always done exceptionally well in is ad tech. So it’s not terribly surprising that one of its startups would quietly do a $85 million mega-round.

ironSource, a Tel Aviv-based company with reach into both the Chinese and U.S. markets, is picking up this funding from a syndicate of institutional and strategic partners across the U.S., mainland China and Europe. They’re not naming investors, but the group includes some of the largest known strategic partners in mainland China. (They are not that many of them, so it’s not hard to guess.)

The investment will go toward international expansion. ironSource has built a suite of solutions to help app and software developers distribute and monetize their work. They support about 5 million installs per day, and have more than 50,000 applications using their SDK.

Originally founded by four people including three brothers back in 2009, they built products like FoxTab, a 3D tab management add-on for the Firefox browser. They then expanded into mobile offerings with products like mobileCore, which is part of a mobile app install network.

“Our technology will allow software developers to reach their users from one platform no matter what devices they’re using or what they’re consuming the content on,” said Omer Kaplan, who is the company’s deputy CEO. ironSource has about 450 employees across Tel Aviv, Beijing, San Francisco and New York.

Mobile app distribution remains a complex and difficult space, as Facebook’s phenomenal success in the space has squeezed a lot of early competitors including players like Flurry, which sold to Yahoo. But Kaplan says ironSource has managed to stay profitable since its very early days.