App Annie rival raises $4.2m to expand beyond Japan

Fuller founder and CEO Shuta Shibuya.

Japanese mobile app analytics company Fuller announced a series C round of financing for US$4.2 million yesterday. Investors in the round include Sega Games, Voyage Ventures, Global Catalyst Partners, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and two other local government-related investors from Nigata and Ibaraki prefectures. Since its founding in 2011, Fuller has raised a total of US$7.5 million.

He sees a day when building an app is as easy as building a website through WordPress.

Founder and CEO Shuta Shibuya left his job at Japanese gaming company Gree after well-known entrepreneur Daisuke Iwase convinced him to quit and focus on his idea. Shuta grabbed three friends and started up Fuller nearly five years ago.

Fuller makes phone checkups, flashlights, calculators, and taxi fare estimator apps. User data gathered from these and other apps is then used in its mobile app analytics service App Ape, which is focused on Japan and South Korea.

Including free users, App Ape is used by over 2,000 app publishers and developers in Japan. Numbers for Korea aren’t available.

Making apps easier

The team plans to use the funds to expand its analytics abroad and develop its website-to-native-app conversion service Joren. Shuta sees a day when building an app is as easy as building a website through WordPress.

While still in pre-registration, 790 people have signed up since May. Joren was also used to make the official apps for San Francisco’s Japanese culture festival J-Pop Summit, which is taking place this weekend. Fuller says the app took less than a month to complete.

The app feels decently ported with an Airbnb style of wide pictures and text overlay. However, the site it is based off is content heavy and created with Bootstrap and WordPress, which makes it quite mobile friendly already. Complex sites may be more difficult to port. A representative confirmed by email that frameworks have better structure which does in fact make conversion easier.

When the service is fully launched, users will be able to input their website link and download both iOS and Android apps when the conversion is done – like GoNative. There are extra options for app themes, push notifications, analytics, and content management.

A number of native app conversion companies have come out over the years and many have silently slipped away. Apportable was backed by some major investors like Google Ventures, but the website is now just a skeleton of broken links.

Fuller’s team will need to really look through the cadavers to figure out where others failed if they want to be successful.