New user acquisition Acquired.io raises $2m in funding

June 27, 2017 - San Francisco, CA - The founders of mobile marketing company AppScotch, acquired by AppAnnie, today launched their newest venture, Acquired.io. The company has created the first centralized platform to manage user acquisition across dozens of channels like Snapchat, AdColony, Chartboost, and others. Initial customers include IGG, the company behind Lords Mobile, and TextNow, the popular messaging app.

Acquired.io has raised $2 million in funding from investors, many in the mobile gaming space. Notable names include Jonathan Zweig, founder of AdColony (acquired by Opera), and John Zdanowski, former CFO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life.

Most user acquisition teams spend approximately half their ad budget on Google and Facebook and the other half on dozens of smaller channels, which must be managed individually, making the process time consuming and laborious. Acquired.io has found that the average UA team spends 80% of their time on this manual grunt work. And the problem is only getting larger - the number of channels grew from 700 in 2015 to 1,500 this year.

Acquired.io is the first system that allows UA teams to manage all of these channels from a single place. The platform currently supports 20 channels, which will increase to 50 by the end of this year. In addition to more efficient management, the platform also enables UA teams to easily discover and test new channels without having to go through a costly new set up process. Identifying high performing smaller channels is especially important for UA teams as Google and Facebook become increasingly competitive.

"The sheer number of apps out there today makes it difficult for companies to get noticed. To be able to compete, advertisers need to maintain a wide and diverse portfolio of channels to acquire users, which puts enormous pressure on UA teams," said Andrey Kazakov, co-founder and CEO of Acquired.io. "Most advertisers have a portfolio of channels they deal with which spans from 10 to 50 channels depending on the company. Constantly discovering ways to acquire users is a part of the day to day job for UA teams, adding even more manual operations to their daily work. Our goal is to minimize the unnecessary manual work they face every day."

Acquired.io is already working with major players in the mobile space. Customers span gaming, messaging, social networking and more.

"Mobile user acquisition, as the market grows, has become some sort of a 'jungle' for most publishers, with hundreds of networks or channels to deal with. Configuring, monitoring and optimizing thousands of online campaigns is a labor intensive, manual process for most," said Mark Zhang, SVP of Global Operations at IGG, one of Acquired.io's first customers. "While the largest mobile gaming companies have the financial, technical and/or human resources to tackle this problem, most small to medium size publishers end up running mobile campaigns very inefficiently. I'm very excited to see Acquired.io coming up with a first of its kind, one-stop, DIY platform to solve this problem at scale."

"Acquired.io centralizes our UA data and gives us the tools we need to increase our marketing efficiency," said Mark Braatz GM and VP, Growth at TextNow, another Acquired.io customer. "We're able to leverage rules based optimizations across channels to maximize ROI - managing these capital allocations within a single dashboard is a huge win."

In the future, Acquired.io will add automation features that further simplify campaign management. In addition, they will expand into new markets so that customers may use the platform to discover international channels.