SUMMARY
The Funding Was Led By GCP Capital, New Investor ATW Partners, And Existing Investor Madrona Ventures
A few weeks after scaling its business operations in India by establishing its headquarters in Kolkata, MobileWalla, the US-based next-generation consumer data company, has raised $12.5 Mn in a Series B funding round.
The investment was led by New York-based GCP Capital with participation from its existing investor, Madrona Venture Group, and a new investor, ATW Partners.
Anindya Datta, CEO and founder of MobileWalla, said, “We have been expanding our global footprint, and we can now put real resources in geographies like Japan, Korea, India, and Australia, all of which have such incredible growth potential.”
MobileWalla also has offices in NYC and Atlanta in the US, Australia, London, and Singapore. Additionally, the company is looking to grow its data science team, enhance its ability to take strategic data acquisitions from partners, and make them even better and more precise. “Our ability to combat fraud, predict age and gender, and verify footfall traffic will all take a leap forward this year,” Datta added.
MobileWalla claims to be the only consumer intelligence platform that can analyse audiences persistently as they evolve on a global scale, thereby encompassing demographic, behavioural, and systems-usage information for more than 1.3 Bn consumers across 31 different countries.
In an earlier interaction with Inc42, Datte had stated that MobileWalla doesn’t do what Neilson or Comscore might be doing. “If you need to reach women aged between 18-35 in India, we will give you an audience segment, say of 6.5 Mn devices, which belong to this particular age group. You can take it and then, with the help of companies like Inmobi, can push data as per the need of your campaign,” he explained.
MobileWalla, as it is today, took shape in 2010. In its early days, the company was backed by IAN and is now growing at a fast pace. It’s now monetising through its subscription-based DaaS services as well as its audience targeting and segmentation service.
It claims to have:
- Team Size: 50 (global), 20 (India)
- Revenue: $10 Mn Annual run rate, Grown 80% Q-o-Q for the past 8 quarters
- 85 Customers
MobileWalla’s platform currently serves major B2C enterprises in industries such as telecommunications, retail, consumer packaged goods, and financial services. It also claims to be the leading provider of Nielsen-verified mobile audience insights.
“GCP Capital Partners has invested in and evaluated numerous businesses in the consumer data industry. In an industry where many companies claim to possess differentiated data, we were excited by MobileWalla’s truly unique product capabilities, especially around data cleansing, fraud mitigation, and storage,” says Boris Gutin, managing director of GCP Capital Partners.
According to a few industry experts, the big data analytics sector in India is expected to witness an eight-fold jump and reach $16 Bn by 2025 from the current $2 Bn. MobileWalla, with its audience segmentation and targeting as well as DaaS services, provides a holistic set of services to its clients under one roof.
However, with India being a price-sensitive country, will the company be able to turn around enough volume to get revenues at par with the global standards? That is the question.
