Tapjoy Hires New CFO as It Hints at IPO Prospects
A week after it raised $30 million from JPMorgan, mobile app monetization company Tapjoy is picking up a new chief financial officer, Al Wood, who has led two previous companies through the IPO process.
The release announcing Wood’s hire only mentioned the word IPO three times, and given the $30 million round on top of a $21 million round in January led by Rho Ventures, Tapjoy is likely priced out of acquisition range. That funding also comes on top of the $19.6 million the company raised in two rounds when it was known as Offerpal and operated mostly on the Facebook platform. The company, however, restructured when it began focusing on Android and iOS and we do not know how the terms of the Rho round this year changed the valuation.
Wood was chief financial officer at Veraz Networks, which raised $72 million in a public offering in 2007 and eventually merged with Dialogic Corporation last year. He also was CFO at PalmSource, a subsidiary that licensed the Palm OS and was spun out of Palm in 2003.
Tapjoy is the biggest of the mobile monetization and offer companies. It went heavily into incentivized installs, where users can get virtual currency in a game if they download apps from other developers, before this practice was shut down by Apple on iOS. It’s now moving aggressively into Android and into serving video trailers for games.
After being shaken around by two of the biggest platforms, Facebook and iOS, the big question is whether the company can show a stable enough revenue model to entice investors in public markets. Stay tuned.
September 7th, 2011 at 4:16 pm
[...] which has been beefing up its executive ranks as of late, just hired a new chief marketing officer who was credited with having launched the original [...]
November 30th, 2011 at 6:34 pm
[...] However, sources familiar with the company’s discussions say it has been actively pursuing talks with strategic acquirers like Zynga, Electronic Arts, GREE and DeNA and that it has been filling out its executive ranks ahead of either a sale or a public offering. The company did hire a chief financial officer in July named Al Wood who had led two companies through the IPO p… [...]