The analytics bandwagon arrived at the mobile universe this week after Localytics Inc. closed a $35 million investment from venture capitalists to help drive the adoption of its data-driven targeting service. The funding follows a record year that saw revenue more than double, according to the company.

That boost came on the back of an equally impressive increase in the number of organizations leveraging Localytics’ cloud-based platform, which provides information on how users interact with mobile applications. The startup stands out from the many others offering similar services thanks to an integrated approach that pairs the data with functionality for acting upon it.

That integration allows publishers to distill insights about the habits of their audiences into push notifications and in-app messages that are customized accordingly. A marketer could, for example, measure how much time members of a particular demographic spend on an application every day, produce more of the content that proved the most effective in holding their attention and test different variations for the optimal recipe, all without leaving the dashboard.

The ability to carry out the entire process in the same environment instead of switching back and forth among different services as is required with some alternatives is apparently big enough of a benefit to have helped Localytics win over big-name customers such as Microsoft, Visa Inc. and Home Box Office, Inc. The new funding is meant to fuel the development of predictive analytic functionality to reinforce that advantage.

Yet the most notable part of the investment is not what the startup plans to do with the capital but rather where it’s coming from. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of business intelligent SAP SE, which is locked in a fierce competition with Oracle and Adobe Systems Inc. over enterprise marketing budgets.

It’s not uncommon for big vendors to buy a stake in potential acquisition targets before swooping in, a move that would make sense in this case. The addition of a proven (not to mention popular) mobile solution such as Localytics’ service could provide SAP with a potential edge. At the very least, having a seat on the board should make it considerably harder for competitors to make a move.

The round, which brings Localytics’ total raised to $60 million, also saw the participation of existing backers Foundation Capital and Polaris Partners. Doug Higgins of Sapphire is joining the startup’s board as part of the investment.

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