Apptopia Hires Chief Data Officer

In the US, mobile app intelligence provider Apptopia has hired former DataXu exec Amit Phansalkar as Chief Data Officer.

Apptopia provides data on app store downloads, revenue and SDK use for 'every mobile app and every publisher in the world', for purposes including competitor monitoring, strategy development and trend-spotting. Offices are in Boston and in Kiev, Ukraine, and headcount has increased from eighteen to 42 employees in the last twelve months. In November, the firm raised $2.7m in a second round of seed funding.

Phansalkar (pictured) joins from data tech company DataXu, where he served as Lead Innovation, Data Sciences and Analytics. Prior to this he was Chief Data Officer / VP Analytics at MassMutual Financial Group; Global Director of Data Sciences and Advanced Analytics at Millward Brown Digital; and he co-founded and served as VP Analytics and Solutions at Cognika Corp. He also co-founded non-profit adtech fraud specialist Botlab, and he co-chairs the data science Board at I-Com.

In his new role, Phansalkar will lead the vision and strategy for Apptopia's data innovation in its products with data science. Commenting on the deal, COO and co-founder Jonathan Kay said: 'Amit is joining us at an exciting time for Apptopia as we've recently launched, Acquisition Pro, a powerful tool to help advise any company's mobile user acquisition spend. We couldn't be happier to bring Amit aboard as we continue to build tools to help make app data more actionable for our customers. His extensive experience in the industry allows him to step in and have an immediate impact on the future of our business'.

Web site: www.apptopia.com .