• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 24, 2020

Mobile measurement and marketing company AppsFlyer has announced an investment from Salesforce Ventures that the company says gives it a $2 billion valuation. 

The venture funding arm of cloud company Salesforce joined a roster of investors in a late stage extension of its series D round led by General Atlantic earlier this year. In January, AppsFlyer raised $210 million at a $1.6 billion valuation in a fourth round of funding. At that time it had raised more than $294 million.

AppsFlyer aims to measure mobile ad spending and collect data in a privacy-compliant way.

Salesforce Ventures’ latest investment supports AppsFlyer’s focus on becoming a customer-focused, privacy-first attribution company.

The new funding comes as shifts in privacy policies and regulations take hold.

While the investment signals the advertising industry’s growing reliance on mobile attribution data, Apple plans to make ad tracking much more difficult as it retires Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to increase user privacy. Consumers will need to opt into being tracked, rather than opt out.

Google also will stop supporting third-party cookies in 2021. And advertising insiders are convinced the federal government under president elect Joe Biden will see a national consumer privacy standards for the United States.

About 73% of the 171 marketers participating in an AppsFlyer survey expect there will be a negative impact of Apple's IDFA changes for iOS 14 on their campaigns and apps -- losing about half of identifiers under Apple's opt-in protocol.

Targeting, measurement and attribution will be the most challenging factors. The survey was conducted in September 2020.

Many marketers are not at all familiar with the Apple's plans. When AppsFlyer asked marketers how familiar they are with Apple's IDFA and iOS 14 announcement, only 6% of respondents said they are extremely familiar. Some 57% said they are either somewhat familiar or very familiar, and 37% said they are either not very familiar or not familiar at all.

Overall, AppsFlyer has raised more than $300 million in funding -- expanding to 1,000 employees globally, and exceeding about $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). 

The company supports about 12,000 brands such as Macy's, Minecraft, Nike, NBC Universal, Tencent, US Bank, Wayfair, and StitchFix.

The company’s marketplace reaches more than 8,000 partners including Facebook, Google, Apple Search Ads, Twitter, TikTok Ads, Pinterest, Snap, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle.