Flurry Raises Another $12.5M For Mobile Analytics And Advertising
Mobile analytics company Flurry has raised $12.5 million in new funding, as first revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and confirmed by a Flurry spokesperson. — The company started …
Context & Ripple Effects
Flurry's new $12.5 million round lands three weeks after TapCommerce raised $10.5M to chase the mobile ad retargeting "land grab" — evidence that investors see measurement and ad-tech as the same race. Flurry's pitch rests on its installed base: the company reports detecting around 1 billion smartphones and tablets in use worldwide every month, spanning more than 2,000 unique device models.
That footprint is also its research arm. Flurry's own data has charted the shift it now wants to monetize — consumer app usage overtaking desktop browsing in 2012, daily app time reaching 127 minutes and starting to challenge television, and a 68 percent year-over-year jump in US app sessions this Thanksgiving. The raise funds turning that audience insight into advertising revenue.
First-order effects
- The fresh capital lets Flurry push further into advertising, putting it in direct competition with retargeting specialists like TapCommerce, which raised $10.5M in November 2013.
Second-order effects
- Rival ad networks must respond to a competitor whose free analytics SDK doubles as a targeting-data advantage, pressuring them to bundle measurement with media rather than sell each separately.
- Game developers already consulting Flurry on free-to-play design gain an integrated path from tuning to monetization, concentrating ad spend with whichever platform holds both the data and the inventory.
Third-order effects
- If analytics providers keep converting measurement data into ad inventory, the mobile stack consolidates around full-service data-plus-media platforms, squeezing standalone point tools.
- Flurry's usage findings — apps challenging TV at 127 minutes per day — point advertisers toward in-app budgets; if that pattern holds, measurement companies become gatekeepers deciding where brand dollars flow.
The trend: Mobile analytics firms are raising growth capital to convert SDK-scale usage data into ad-targeting businesses, riding the migration of consumer attention from desktop web and television into apps.