Excl: IAN may join early Amazon backer Madrona to invest in Mobilewalla

Mobilewalla, a search portal for mobile apps, is close to raising around $4 million in Series A funding round led by US-based VC firm Madrona Venture Group, which was an early investor in e-commerce giant Amazon Inc. Indian Angel Network (IAN) members Sharad Sharma, Venkat Raju and Google India chief Rajan Anandan may also participated in the round, sources privy to the development told Techcircle.in.

Founded in March 2011 by Anindya Datta, a professor with School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Mobilewalla provides search and discovery engine for finding mobile apps. Datta is a serial entrepreneur, who founded Chutney Technologies, a data streaming technology firm in 1999. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005.

When contacted by Techcircle.in, IAN spokesperson declined to comment while an email query sent to Datta did not immediately elicit any response.

Mobilewalla creates solutions to perform real-time big analytics and gathers virtually all available information regarding every mobile app running on the Apple, Android, Blackberry and Windows 7 platforms.

The Mobilewalla platform enables consumers, advertisers and developers to navigate the mobile application marketplaces and offers a real-time rating and ranking system apps. Headquartered in Atlanta, the company has offices in Kolkata in India and Singapore.

Mobilewalla positions itself as the Nielsen/ComScore for mobile apps – providing ratings and rankings of apps on all leading mobile platforms. It caters mainly to ad networks, ad agency trading desks and also targets app publishers to understand their audience/consumers better, get a feel for their product/service rating in comparison to competition, and insights to increase their customer base.

Madrona Venture Group, which led the investment round, has been investing in early-stage tech companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995. It has so far invested in close to 70 companies operating in the areas including consumer internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, mobile and networking and infrastructure. Madrona currently manages nearly $700 million and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)