Aptoide, a Portuguese store applications for Android, raised an investment of four million dollars, approximately EUR 3.7 million in a round led by the European arm of e.ventures investment fund and where also participated in the Portugal Ventures.
Aptoide is an application store for smartphones, tablets and other Android devices, alternative to Google Play. There are several of these stores, some developed by giants such as Amazon and Samsung. The Aptoide also allows people and companies (such as telcos and device manufacturers) to create their own stores with a selection of applications, in a manner similar to YouTube, which allows anyone to create their video channel.
In addition to e.ventures and Portugal Ventures (which aggregates the capital public risk and had in 2013 invested 740,000 euros in the company), joined the investment round the Gobi Partners Chinese and the Golden Gate Ventures, which is based in Singapore. The Aptoide declined to disclose the amount of capital given in exchange for the investment.
The co-founder Álvaro Pinto explains that the company is already profitable and sought investors to continue growth. “We are competing in an ultra-competitive global market. We needed to have greater investment capacity. ” Last year, the use of the shop grew 100%. In Southeast Asia, one of the regions where the company is betting, the growth was 200%.
The goal, explains Alvaro Pinto, is “to be a second app store [ application store], because obviously the first is Google. ” “The ambition is to maintain this growth rate of 100% per year,” he added.
Aptoide was born in 2009 as a project within another company, Magic Box, responsible for a Linux distribution with the same name that came to be installed in portable Magellan. In 2011 it became a company.
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