Conduit – Another Billion-Dollar Valuation

According to a Gartner report, worldwide revenues from app downloads is expected to grow 62% this year to $25 billion. The growth in the mobile app market is driven by the increasing use of mobile devices globally. It is estimated that mobile consumers spend nearly two hours on an average each day with mobile apps.

Conduit’s Offerings
One such player making it big in the app development market is Israel-based Conduit. Conduit was founded in 2005 by serial entrepreneur Ronen Shilo along with Dror Erez and Gaby Bilczyk. The company began as a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform with the intention of creating an offering that would help web publishers connect with their end users worldwide.

Today, Conduit’s offerings include Community Toolbars and mobile apps that help their customers to engage users across multiple platforms. Their solutions have helped them become among the fastest-growing network of publishers in the world, with more than 260,000 publishers worldwide connecting more than 250 million users in 120 countries. Their customer list includes big names such as Groupon, Fox News, Time Warner Cable, Travelocity, and The Weather Channel, to name a few.

To help publishers connect with their consumers, Conduit offers multiple products. Their mobile app offering, known as Conduit Mobile, helps publishers connect with users on the go by offering tools and customization options for the app maker that makes it simple for the publisher to create an app. The development of the app does not require too much coding effort, and the publisher can thus focus on the content and develop high-quality mobile apps and sites for leading mobile devices.

Besides mobile app, Conduit is better known for their Community Toolbar. The Toolbar is a customizable toolbar that lets their customers connect with end users by creating a toolbar that is accessible on most browsers and acts as a constant top of mind recall for the end users. The Toolbar helps improve revenues and profits for Conduit’s customers by letting them manage the content available to end users.

Conduit also helps publishers improve their revenues through a targeted message offering, Wibiya. The Wibiya Bar on customers’ sites tracks user demographic and behavior to display messages that are most relevant to them.

Conduit’s Financials

Conduit earns revenues through a subscription-based model. Their Mobile offering is available for free for organizations with fewer than five app users and the price goes up to a premium subscription of $99 per month for an unlimited number of app users. The premium version comes with features such as push notifications and customer support. In addition, they also earn ad based revenues through their Toolbar. Conduit Toolbar is available for free to their users. Conduit earns performance payout revenues from Microsoft’s Bing in the U.S. and Google outside the U.S. revenues for searches run through this Toolbar.

Conduit’s financials are not disclosed publicly, but a report cites that they earned $500 million in revenues last year and generated $200 million in profits.

Conduit continues to remain venture funded. They have received funding of over $110 million from investors, including Benchmark and J.P. Morgan. The last round of funding held in April 2012 was led by J.P. Morgan and pegged their valuation at $1.3 billion.