PacketZoom Inc., a four-year-old startup that focuses on improving the performance of mobile apps, today announced that it has bagged $5 million in funding.

The Series A round was led by Baseline Ventures. The investment firm has previously backed high-profile tech companies such as Instagram and ExactTarget, a marketing automation provider that was acquired by Salesforce.com Inc. for $2.5 billion. Several other institutional backers contributed to PacketZoom’s new round as well, bringing its total raised to about $9 million.

The startup sells a service that can make apps feel more responsive by optimizing how they load content. The Mobile Expresslane, as the product is called, fine-tunes the connection between devices and the remote servers from which they retrieve data based on each handset’s networking characteristics. This includes the amount of available bandwidth, latency and packet loss rates among others.

PacketZoom also collects information about the carrier network that a device is linked to. Mobile Expresslane uses these details to try to ensure that content is loaded smoothly when network conditions are not ideal, which is too often the case when it comes to mobile connections.

According to PacketZoom, the result is an up to threefold performance improvement and a signicant reduction in loading errors. Such a big boost can noticeably improve the usability of apps such as mobile newsreaders that rely heavily on content fetched from across the web.

PacketZoom also offers a complementary monitoring tool that enables developers to manually tackle performance issues. Dubbed Mobile IQ, the software provides a dashboard for tracking key usability metrics and can generate alerts if a potential problem emerges.

Optimizing performance is a priority in practically every mobile development project, which gives PacketZoom a big addressable market. But the startup can expect competition. Earlier this month, Cloudflare Inc. acquired an app acceleration provider called Neumob Inc. to establish a stronger presence in the mobile ecosystem.

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