Alexa Competitor SimilarWeb Raises $15M To Expand Into Mobile Analytics, App Engagement Insights

Online, and now, mobile measurement service SimilarWeb has raised $15 million in Series D funding from prior investors Naspers and angel investor Lord David Alliance, chairman of clothing catalog retailer N Brown Group, as the company prepares to expand its capabilities in terms of measuring mobile application data, including app engagement metrics.

To date, Tel Aviv-headquartered SimilarWeb has raised a total of $40 million in outside funding.

Today with a team of almost 100 employees, the company operates from offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Dubai and has resellers based in Russia, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere. In part, the new funding will be put towards SimilarWeb’s opening of a new office in New York.

Additionally, the company is moving into an area that will see it competing with companies like App Annie, which recently began building out a service that’s stepping in where Onavo left off, before being acquired by Facebook. Onavo, as you may recall, developed a number of consumer-facing apps for things like data compression or VPNs. By nature of running traffic through its own applications, Onavo soon had a wealth of data on the often hidden world of mobile app usage, engagement, and retention.

The app stores’ charts currently tend to only recognize metrics like numbers of downloads combined with velocity, in terms of ranking popular apps. But Onavo and soon, App Annie’s forthcoming service, could peer inside apps to indicate how well they’re performing with users and more. That’s what SimilarWeb is now building as well. Its product will be able to provide data on things like how often users are opening the app, how long they use it, how regularly they return, churn rates, affinity (people who like app X, also tend to like app Y), and so on.

To establish its footprint on mobile, the company is building its own portfolio of mobile applications, as Onavo did and App Annie is also doing, but it’s also buying data from partners who are positioned to give it an unbiased look at data across the app stores.

With the funding, SimilarWeb also says it plans to make some acquisitions that could help further these interests, both in mobile analytics players as well as apps that could help it maintain a good window on app store activities.

As for its website measurement Alexa competitor, SimilarWeb won’t disclose its customer numbers or how many are paying, only telling us that it has “grown every month in terms of both revenue and customers,” and that growth has been in the double digits.

While some of its data is free on the web for anyone to view, its paid service starts at $200/month for small firms, then scales up to enterprise offerings. According to Ari Rosenstein, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at SimilarWeb, the service appeals to those who need website measurement data for a larger number of countries than some competitors provide.

Specifically, the service offers data for 60 countries, where a competitor like HitWise offers around half a dozen, for example.

Earlier this year, SimilarWeb expanded to measure mobile web data for the U.S. and U.K., and then moved into app store analytics this September, providing data about top keywords, how users are navigating the app store, how people find apps and more.

The company is preparing to roll out the beta registration for its mobile app engagement measurement service over the next few weeks. While some data it pulls will be free, much of it will be bundled into the company’s mobile package pricing plans already live now (pricing TBD).