Priori Data, an app store data and analytics provider, has secured $1 million in seed financing to build a kind of Bloomberg-style platform for mobile industry professionals and analysts. The cash was raised from unnamed sources but, says the company, includes the Berlin angel investor community, private individuals from New York private equity and hedge fund circles.
It has a large database of app information and tracks the performance of over 2 million apps from 300 thousand publishers across 30 countries. Its main competitors are App Annie and Mattermark and may eventually include S&P Capital IQ. Its data gets quoted in the Washington Post and Quartz, among others.
The company was founded by Patrick Kane, a former analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York. Kane says Priori Data’s focus comes from both the commoditization of app data and the increasing number of companies that rely on apps for the bulk of their revenue.
So for instance, King.com is a public company whose data is publicised quarterly and derives over 70 percent of its revenue from mobile — 95 percent of which is from three games. Investors in King.com can use Priori Data’s data around download and revenue estimates as a real-time data feed into King’s performance. See?
“King’s data is a commodity. It’s the modern day equivalent of standing outside the supermarket and checking what’s inside the shopping cart of everyone who walks out,” says Kane. “It beats the information inefficiency of the public market – it is legalized insider trading.”
That may well be, and the emergence of startups like Priori Data shows that this trend will continue as more mobile companies IPO and their app data becomes important to retail investors.