Apptopia Secures Funding From Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Sound Ventures

What started as a marketplace for reselling apps has turned into an app intelligence source — one that helps feed data to Google, Facebook, Pinterest and NBCU, to name a few — and its caught investors’ eyes.

Apptopia has just hit a total funding to date of $5 million with the most recent help from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary and their Sound Ventures. This latest investment was more than half of the total, but previous investors, like Marc Cuban, RTA Ventures and Full Tilt Capital, are named as earlier funders.

The business said that Sound Ventures was highly interested in researching before offering to invest and tried out some competing products before making a financial bid. Research from the company proved to Kutcher and Oseary that the business knew what it was doing and that led to the investment.

Apptopia, which competes with App Annie, Sensor Tower, SimilarWeb and others, started as a resale app marketplace but turned the corner to intelligence after realizing which was a more lucrative business. However, it used its knowledge gained in the marketplace to power the newer venture, which began in June 2015.

While Apptopia may have captivated some investors’ interest, there were others it may have turned away. Earlier in its history, the business was offered to sell for $27 million, but when the deal dropped to $12 million on the sale date, Apptopia refused the entire transaction. That’s when it switched gears to focus on data.

Apptopia CEO Eliran Sapir said the focus of the company is on app developers and publishers, rather than the finance industry, which is where many of its competitors have succeeded. Housing and offering a range of statistics, Apptopia provides data like daily and monthly active app users, how many times they access the app and for how long, how the app was built, as well as data on in-app advertising, such as how much was spent, and other data. Pricing for Apptopia’s services begins at just under $80 per month and ranges all the way up to $5,000 for larger businesses.

With the new funding, the businesses said it will expand to a team of about 80 people and focus on additional sales and marketing.