App attribution company TUNE is dog-earing a significant chunk of a new funding round to go on a hiring spree.
Announced Thursday, the Series B cash injection was led by Icon Ventures (which happened to have rebranded from Jafco Ventures on Monday), with contributions from Performance Equity Management and Accel Partners, the latter which also participated in TUNE’s $9.4 million Series A in 2013. This most recent round brings TUNE’s overall funding to $33.4 million.
TUNE’s engineering team – which comprises 90 of its 250 total employees – will get a serious boost, said CEO Peter Hamilton, who noted that the company could hire as many as 60 new product engineers in the coming quarters.
“Of course we don’t plan to spend it all,” said Hamilton of the $27 million round. “This funding is more of a strategic milestone for us to help us create stability, market dominance and give us the flexibility to make adjustments as we go along.”
A few dollars will also go towards account management and technical support, as well as into educational resources for the mobile marketing community, such as webinars, white papers and other BI documentation on topics like deep-linking, multitouch attribution, retargeting and mobile-specific KPIs.
That particular initiative ties into the more unified one-stop-shop structure TUNE has been looking to achieve overall since rebranding from HasOffers in July.
The TUNE umbrella houses MobileAppTracking (which tracks mobile app installs and in-app events), the aforementioned HasOffers (which helps ad networks track their publisher relationships and reconcile post-conversion and post-install payment) and MobileDevHQ (which aims to help developers manage their unpaid acquisition channels). TUNE acquired MobileDevHQ in August for an undisclosed sum.
TUNE also facilitates a partner portal to help ad networks co-manage campaigns with publisher clients and an agency center which allows agencies to manage all of their clients using TUNE in a single view. Fetch, Dentsu Aegis, Havas Media, IPG Mediabrands all use the tool.
“Our products are geared towards providing marketers with insight across paid acquisition, retargeting and engagement, app store analytics, app discovery and organic users, and towards connecting marketers to everyone in the ecosystem,” Hamilton said. “You can think of our products in two parts, our direct-to-marketer solutions and our other solutions that support the ecosystem.”
Although Hamilton said TUNE isn’t in any “active conversations at the moment” in terms of M&A, the company is looking to roll out product features and enhancements throughout Q1 and Q2. One such item which recently left the launchpad was a feature that enables developers to view cost data – the information they use to run return on ad spend analysis – alongside their install, engagement and revenue data without having to log into multiple systems.
“We want to build a product for anything marketers are spending their time doing in spreadsheets,” said Hamilton. “Copying and pasting numbers from multiple systems is not fun. I can tell you that firsthand.”
In terms of HasOffers’ (as it was then known) February 2014 kerfuffle with Facebook over its handling of customer access to device level performance and attribution data – HasOffers, along with other mobile analytics company Kontagent, which now goes by the name of Upsight, were both removed from Facebook’s mobile measurement partner program – Hamilton said the company has more than moved on.
“We’re just staying focused on how to provide the most value for customers and be the best platform we can be,” Hamilton said.
Based in Seattle, TUNE also has offices in San Francisco, New York City, Seoul, London, Berlin and Tel Aviv. The company has more than 2,000 customers, including Starbucks, The New York Times, Uber, eBay, Zynga, Sephora, Supercell, Trulia and Zulily. Gaming and entertainment make up the lion’s share of TUNE’s client base, followed by ecommerce apps, brand apps and travel apps.
