AppVirality Raises $465,000 To Give Developers User Growth Tools

AppVirality, an Indian startup that wants to make it easy for developers to increase their user base, announced today that it has raised $465,000 in seed funding. The company, which took part in Microsoft Accelerator last year, will use the capital for product development and hiring.

Investors include Rajan Anandan, managing director of Google India; Mike Galgon, co-founder of aQuantive; Ravi Gururaj, chair of the Nasscom product council; Baron Capital research analyst Ashim Mehra; InMobi vice president of technology Mohit Saxena; and VC firms India Internet Group and TNN Capital.

AppVirality provides a software development kit (SDK) and dashboard that allows developers to add growth-hacking techniques to their apps without having to write new code. Tools currently include an in-app referral system (similar to the one used by Uber), as well as a feature that lets users share their purchases on an e-commerce app to social networks. AppVirality is also adding new tools that will let developers add sweepstakes to their apps, prompt users to unlock premium content by sharing their activity on social networks, or run personalized in-app referrals.

The combination of its SDK and dashboard mean that marketers without coding experience can manage AppVirality’s features, say co-founder Laxman Papineni.

Alternatives to AppVirality include Branch Metrics and TapStream, both of which also offer SDKs with user conversion tools. Papineni says AppVirality differentiates by providing a dashboard and in-depth metrics. The dashboard allows developers to run A/B tests and see analytics that show them the number of people they have reached through each tool and how many downloads and revenue it has generated.

Papineni says the AppVirality founding team got the idea for the startup while working on a website and app with train schedules. They were able to monitor where traffic to their website came from, but didn’t have anyway to track the same information on their mobile apps.

“Everyone was using different techniques to grow and as a developer, we didn’t know what would work best on our app. So we decided to build an SDK with all these growth techniques that people can turn on and off without coding,” says Papineni.

Its seed round marks the first time AppVirality, which launched in November, has received outside funding.