28. Appsumer

Founder: Shumel Lais
Founded: June 2015 (Launched in August 2016)
Wesbite: www.appsumer.io

Up from 57  in 2017, we welcome back Appsumer to our esteemed Startups 100 index.

A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, Appsumer enables app businesses to optimise their marketing campaigns and, therefore, achieve maximum return on their advertising spend.

Unlike many of the businesses in this list, founder Shumel Lais – who has worked in marketing roles for M&C Saatchi Mobile and Fetch – admits that Appsumer wasn’t launched on the back of an “aha moment”.

Instead, he says, the business idea was inspired from his years of “experiencing the problem all marketers face without effective reporting systems”:

“Traditionally marketers had to download reports from each media channel and then spend hours compiling and fixing the data before they could analyse it and make decisions.”

Since launch in August 2016, you could say that the “aha moment” has in fact been achieved with the clients the business works with.

In just over a year of launching its product, Appsumer already powers some of the largest mobile app ad spenders globally. This includes top grossing apps across multiple verticals from dating to gaming such as Lovoo, Viber, Outplay, and more. It also proudly boasts a 100% customer retention rate.

Backed by $1m in funding from specialist angel syndicate Galvanise, which includes a host of angel investors who are experienced ex-advertising industry veterans, Appsumer now plans to triple its SaaS business over the next 12 months. This growth will be facilitated with the help of its 25 employees (an 80% increase on 2017).

 

The goalposts for Appsumer have also changed. Whereas the start-up’s goal was previously to become the Hubspot for performance marketing, its ambitions are now significantly larger than this.

Lais tells us that he wants Appsumer to influence more than half of the world’s performance marketing decisions, starting with mobile.