UMeng: Serving Users Comes First, Expanding Into Mobile Ad Area

UMeng, the Innovation Works affiliate focusing on serving app developer with detailed apps usage data, just raised US$ 10 million from venture capital Matrix. Last week we visited the Zhongguancun-based company to talk to its founder and CEO Jiang Fan about UMeng’s expansion plan and its insights into Chinese apps market.

The latest financing round for UMeng is Series A led by Matrix China with other participants. Prior to this round UMeng was funded by Innovation Works, the well-known incubator founded by former Google head Kaifu Lee.

As of now the IW portfolio company has a total of over 60 employees with nearly 50% of them work in technical division. And according to Jiang Fan, an ex-Googler, UMeng is still looking to hire talent engineers for further expansion. Its core team comes from Google China, Microsoft, Baidu and Taobao. Its expenditure comes mainly from servers, bandwidth, headcount and marketing expense.

UMeng launched its app usage statistics product in August of last year, the first ever of its kind in China. iOS and Android developer who incorporated specific code by UMeng into their own apps will get detailed app usage data including: user behavior analysis, daily sessions, new user numbers, usage duration, distribution channel, version of OS, operator, user location and so on. These data are vital to developers since they can gain more insights into how customers use  their apps and what they can improve on to attract more users.

When asked about competitors, Jiang told us that there is barely a direct and all-around competitor who’s doing exactly the same thing as UMeng.

As of now there’re over 6,000 developers using UMeng services who developed more than 10,000 mobile apps. As for the trends in app world, Jiang shared with us some insights:

*Most developers are digging deep in the Tool category due to low cost in development and strong demand from users.

*The second largest app category falls into Entertaining and Ebooks.

*Game remains popular among both mobile users and developers, comes in third.

No Hurry to Profit

When asked about UMeng’s business model and profit plan, Jiang said that “we’re still in the phase of amassing users so current priority is keep improving our product.”

Besides providing developers with useful data and statistics, UMeng also made efforts to help developers monetizing their offerings by means of mobile ads in its recent release of Apps Alliance program. With the program 3rd party developers can max out their ads revenue by customizing ads format, raising the conversion rate.