GetJar began as a small start-up in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2006, and was masterminded by a group of six male entrepreneurs.
But with one billion app downloads to date, GetJar – although a relatively modest-sized company compared to the global force of Apple that has just passed the five billion download mark – is in fact Apple’s biggest competitor as a distributor of apps.
GetJar offers its customers 60,000 mobile phone apps, compared to Apple's 250,000 to date.
However, GetJar’s advantage is that it offers apps across multiple platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian, as well as numerous handsets.
Ilja Laurs, founder and chief executive officer of GetJar said: "This new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development."
GetJar plans to using the investment to develop its consumer-facing website GetJar.com, and mobile site m.getjar.com, as well as its customer solutions such as Pay-Per-Download (PPD), App Download Page (ADP) and App Catalogue Express (ACE).
Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners, said: "We doubled down in this Series B due to GetJar’s momentum as the leading open platform in the mobile apps space".
Wong added: "Mobile app developers need to get discovered, build a marketing channel for mobile users, and scale to massive user bases."
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