AppsFlyer Inc. is not exactly a household name, but its software can be found on the vast majority of smartphones on the planet.

The San Francisco-based startup sells analytics tools that companies such as Nike Inc. use to measure how well their app marketing campaigns are doing. AppsFlyer today announced that it has closed a $210 million investment led by private equity firm General Atlantic to support growth initiatives.

The Series D round follows a $56 million round in early 2017, when the startup’s development kit was already running on 2.5 billion smartphones worldwide. AppsFlyer’s annual recurring revenue has since ballooned fivefold, to more than $150 million, and the startup quadrupled its headcount in the same period to 850 employees.

AppsFlyer’s analytics tools enable enterprise marketing teams to see how many app downloads an online promotion such as a Google ad or an email newsletter drives. The startup provides more advanced features as well, including the ability to map out what factors lead a user to make an in-app purchase and which sites they visit before a transaction or a download.

AppsFlyer over the years has expanded into a number of adjacent areas, including fraud detection. The startup provides a product called Protect360 that uses machine learning to catch bots and other malicious sources of app activity. It tells legitimate users from fake ones by analyzing factors such as the way a handset moves around over the course of the day and how battery charge levels change, which is the kind of data that scammers have a hard time mimicking.

The startup’s products are used by more than 12,000 companies. The list includes Coca-Cola Co., Google LLC’s Waze business, eBay Inc. and other big names.

“Robust attribution has become critical to the ecosystem,” Chief Executive Officer Oren Kaniel said in a prepared statement. “In 2019 alone, our customers made $2 billion worth of decisions using AppsFlyer. The natural progression for us is to maintain an open platform for partners and third-party developers, allowing them to add their own custom solutions on top of ours.”

General Atlantic was joined in the $210 million round by returning AppsFlyer investors Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Pitango Venture Capital and Magma Venture Partners. The startup has raised $294 million to date. 

Photo: AppsFlyer