Global mobile app companies head to Bengaluru seeking top talent

                                                               

Some of the global next-gen mobile companies are making Bengaluru their new home. Applift and Glispa of Berlin, Airpush of the US, and Alibaba-backed Quixey, through its Dexetra acquisition, have checked into the city, and are seeking to attract top developer talent. Bengaluru has one of the largest pools of engineering talent for mobile app development.

Ad platform Applift, part of the Berlin-based Hitfox Group, has set up an R&D centre in Bengaluru that is the largest outside its home base in Berlin. The company, which counts Practo and Myntra as customers, has 70 employees and is planning to hire another 60 by May next year. Applift helps companies like Zynga and Makemytrip acquire users for their apps; they help advertisers to re-engage with loyal and paying users for their mobile apps.

 

Quixey, dubbed as the search engine for the mobile app world, acquired Bengaluru-based startup Dexetra last year. It plans to hire another 50 people here. Quixey, which has raised $135 million in funding led by Alibaba and Softbank, recently rolled out a global product, and called Launch, from India. Launch is an Android app that pulls up everything you need on your phone from people, messages, etc, with one tap.

US-based mobile ad network Airpush has over 250 employees in Los Angeles and Bengaluru and is expanding its footprint here. More than 150,000 apps and advertisers rely on Airpush to deliver targeted mobile ads.

 

Berlin-based digital marketing and mobile ad startup Glispa has Flipkart as an important client in India. It also works with Baidu and OLX. Flipkart has used Glispa's native ad solution to get users to install its app, as also its solution to track how many of them became loyal users over time. Native ads blend into the content of the app and tend to be less irritating for users.

The action in the mobile ad space has picked up because such ad spends are expected to grow rapidly. Research firm eMarketer estimates that in India, this spend would grow from $23 million in 2013 to $943 million by 2018.