When Medialets was founded in June of last year, CEO Eric Litman and his team decided to take a risk. They bet big that Apple’s iPhone platform would explode. It did — and it’s taken Medialets along with it. Today, the mobile analytics and advertising company announces its series A round of funding.
It was barely a month between the founding of the company and the launch of the App Store on July 11 of last year. But Medialets was there from day one. And thanks to that early start, the company’s offerings can now be found installed on nearly half of the iPhones and iPod touches out there in circulation. And their clients include many of the top downloaded apps. But the company clearly hopes the iPhone is just the beginning.
With its new $4 million round led by Foundry Group, and participated in by DFJ Gotham and early Google investor Bobby Yazdani, the company is thinking expansion. It already has been on the Android platform as well since last September. But while that platform has thus far failed to ignite a new market the way the iPhone has, indications seem to point to 2009 being a good year for the platform with many more Android devices coming. The team has already secured over 1,000 developer partnerships between the iPhone and Android platforms.
More importantly, Medialets is also looking to support BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm Pre in 2009. That would obviously put them on basically every major mobile platform.
Medialets has a really nice looking offering it terms of its advertising platform (screenshot below), and Medialytics, its analytics offering, has proved me with some solid mobile data over the past few months (all anonymous of course). One nice thing about Medialytics, is that it can work whether a user is online or offline — something which is often the case with the WiFi-only iPod touch.
It takes courage to take a risk and succeed. well done guys.
Virtually acquire Apple and make profit on…
http://www.webm...r.com/applecom/
What Medialet has done is have the right product on the right platform at the right time. They took a risk with the Apple apps, but they also created a good product. They were smart before they were lucky! Kudos to them!
Wow, that’s great for Eric…I actually met him when I bought something from him on Craigslist (small world, eh?). Best of luck to him and the team at Medialets!
Had to fund the company somehow
Congrats Eric and team!
Thanks, Daniel! We’re big fans of yours. Hope we can work together in the near future
Congrats Eric, Rana & the rest of the Medialets team !
Go forth and be mobile !
Thank you for the kind words, Frederic!
This news does not surprise me
Not surprising news at all. Since I first met Rana she was a blast to hang with, great personality, and had the right idea about everything. Met Eric recently, and he’s a really nice guy, too. Lots of hard work… Congrats to them – they deserve it!
I’m curious about the VC arrangement. Will the existing Medialets workers get reimbursed for the year of unpaid work they performed? Or, will all VC funds go toward future expansion and pay?
Medialets doesn’t have the best mobile analytics product or service, but they have the best outreach marketing. They are great sales people. It will be interesting to see if they can become profitable after investing the 4 mill in expansion.
Nice visualizations but I’m having a tough time understanding the 2nd series in the bottom graph. It looks like the bar chart is the CTR but the values aren’t based on the Impressions and Clicks data for the same dates. Safe to assume that this is just dummy data?
In the top graph, overlaying too many series on the same chart isn’t working (at least for me). Sometimes simplicity in charts goes a long way but I like that you are trying to see how clicks and installs may be impacted by the time between them.
If you are going to have demo/sample charts, they should answer a business question so the users can clearly see the value.
Medialets took a big gamble and it paid off. Wishes of more success in the future.