Yet more consolidation is happening in the world of analytics. Today Israeli web analytics and traffic measurement startup SimilarWeb announced that it has acquired Quettra, a provider of mobile analytics and measurement tools founded by Ankit Jain, the former head of search and discovery in the Google Play store.
Quettra was a relatively young startup. It only came out of stealth last year and had a very impressive list of backers, including include CrunchFund (which was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), Data Collective, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Miramar Digital Venturesand SV Angel, as well as angel investors Amitt Mahajan, Anthony Ha (thedirector at Google, not our writer), Anna Patterson, Carol Sands, Greg Badros and China’s Sungy Mobile Limited (the company behind the GO Launcher and Locker Android apps) as a strategic investor. Quettra had raised around $3 million.
SimilarWeb, meanwhile, has raised $65.1 million in funding, including a recent round of $25 million led by Naspers that valued the company at $400 million.
The companies are not disclosing the value of this deal, except to note that it is in both cash and stock. From what we heard it is a small deal — around $10 million with shares. The whole Quettra team — which also has alums from eBay and Microsoft — is joining SimilarWeb as part of the acquisition, to spearhead the latter company’s new Silicon Valley office.
We’ve covered some of Quettra’s approach to measuring app traffic and usage before. The company had some ambitious plans for how to use its technology to serve a variety of mobile app developer use cases. One product that launched this year was based around the idea of charting your (and millions of other users’) “app graph” and using big data analytics to power personalization.
Other areas that Quettra is able to identify include brand affinities, inferred demographics, and data that explains why users uninstall an app — all major data pain points for developers and app publishers.
Jain says that the decision to sell so early on was in part an admission of the fragmentation in the space and the need for analytics companies to offer cross-platform solutions.
“The digital intelligence space is fragmented with some folks focused on web, others on mobile,” he told me in an interview. “As a marketer, or investor, or developer, you really want to go to one place to learn more about the ‘digital economy’ regardless of medium. That’s where both teams wanted to get to eventually and this merger helps us get there faster than we could individually.”
On the back of strong growth and its funding, SimilarWeb has grown its own employee count three-fold this year, from 100 to 300. It will be integrating Quettra’s tech into its own platform to sharpen competition against the likes of Flurry, comScore and others, and to be able to build completely new kinds of analytics based on the millions of datapoints that Quettra is looking at on its platform.
“We are always looking for ways to enhance our platform and incorporate the best talent and were so impressed by the amazing technology that the visionary management team at Quettra was able to develop” said Or Offer, CEO and Founder of SimilarWeb, in a statement. “By joining forces, we will be able to provide the data that app developers need to better understand their own audience and make better monetization decisions by out strategizing the competition. Our goal is continued investment in the leading talent and technology to ensure we are the number one player in the mobile and app ecosystem.”
This is SimilarWeb’s third acquisition.