Apps Daily announces Series “B” round from Ru-Net Limited, IndoUS Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures

Apps Daily, a mobile application development and distribution company based out of Mumbai, today announced that Ru-Net Limited, IndoUs Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures, invested INR 310 Million in the Series “B” Round.The Company had earlier raised INR 180 Million in 2011 from IndoUS Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures and INR 50 Million in 2010 from the Mumbai Angels, India's leading group of angel investors. Apps Daily plans to utilize these funds to expand their product offering, retail distribution reach and for hiring key employees.

Maria Krajukhina of Ru-Net Limited has joined the Company’s Board of Directors. The other investor directors on the Board are Vani Kola from IndoUs Venture Partners and Rajiv Dadlani from the Mumbai Angels, as well as Varsha Tagare from Qualcomm Ventures who serves as an observer on the Board.

The Company has a unique model of selling and distributing their own and third party products through retail outlets across India. Their products retail under the brand name daily, like daily cop™, daily protect™, daily assure™, and daily complete security™, among others.

Over the past two years, the Company's business model has been strongly validated as they have sold over 1 Million products. The company has a presence in thousands of retail outlets, spread across more than 100 cities and 18 states in India, and employs more than 1,200 people.

Mr. Arun Menon, CEO of Apps Daily said, "We are extremely happy to close this new investment round which is an endorsement of the Company’s product vision, distribution capability, execution talents, and market potential.”

“We first met the company more than a year ago and witnessed tremendous growth, which AppsDaily has managed to maintain ever since. Every single business metric has been steadily improving, and we believe this is just the beginning of the journey. AppsDaily has a very innovative business model suited to India and other emerging markets and fitting unique cultural and economic market environment.” says Maria Krajukhina, from Ru-Net.

Commenting on the occasion, Vani Kola, Managing Partner, IndoUS Venture Partners said, “This offline retail distribution model solves most of the pain points and gaps that currently exist in the other online and Telco/operator distribution models like payment, discovery, support and many others.”

“We are excited about this latest strategic investment round in Apps Daily as it supports Qualcomm’s ongoing objective to continue driving the growth of smartphones and the ecosystem of 3G applications and services in local markets,” said Varsha Tagare, Director of Qualcomm Ventures India.

Rajiv Dadlani, from the Mumbai Angels, said "Apps Daily has a superior and unique offline, direct to consumer, distribution model which is definitely much more suited to the Indian Market, and with more than 200 Million mobile phones being sold every year in India, the Company’s potential to scale very rapidly is tremendous.”

Apps Daily plans to use the new infusion of funds to expand to more than 200 cities in India in the next 12 months and is also planning to start operations in other emerging markets.