AppVirality raises seed funding from Rajan Anandan, Mike Galgon, IIG & others

US-incorporated and Hyderabad-based startup that allows apps to go viral on social media, AppVirality Inc., has raised an undisclosed amount in seed round of funding from a group of angel investors including Google India head Rajan Anandan and Ravi Gururaj besides some early stage VC investors.

The round also saw participation from Mike Galgon, co-founder of aQuantive (which was acquired by Microsoft in a $6 billion deal but later had to be written off); Ashim Mehra, VP, Baron Capital; Mohit Saxena, co-founder and VP technology, InMobi; India Internet Group (IIG) and TNN Capital.

The fund will be utilised for product development and hiring talent.

"Growth hacking is on high time at the moment. Our vision is to build a robust product that gives power to the growth or marketing teams who can login to our dashboard, select growth techniques and implement on the fly, no coding required." said Ram and Laxman Papineni, co-founders of the company (also brothers) said in a joint statement.

The startup was founded by the duo in October 2014. While Ram has a master's electronics, Laxman has studied computer applications. They graduated from Osmania University, Hyderabad. The startup came out of Microsoft Accelerator in May 2014.

AppVirality is a plug and play growth hacking toolkit for mobile apps that helps app developers in identifying and implementing the right growth techniques without having to code. The startup currently offers two growth techniques aimed at increasing app downloads and user engagement through organic channels.

Their latest growth technique -- personalised in-app referrals -- helps  app developers in running custom in-app referrals without having to code. It plans to add three more growth techniques to its product suite by the end of 2015.

"The world is amidst a massive shift in mobile space and we are happy to see one of our portfolio companies is leading this change. We are confident that this investment will drive the AppVirality team to innovate further and bring in more such ideas in the market," said Ravi Narayan, director, Microsoft Ventures India, which runs Microsoft Accelerator.

The startup is working out of the IIT Hyderabad campus and consists of a six member team. It has over 700 apps signed up on its platform.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)