SINGAPORE, March 15 — A shophouse in the city-state may seem an unlikely symbol of Asia’s mobile boom. Yet one muggy evening in March, about 100 people packed out App Annie’s new, larger offices to mark its plan to capture data on millions of new smartphone users.

The start-up will triple staffing at its office in Singapore to 25 people this year as it targets new customers in India and South-east Asia for the data it compiles on apps, how often they are used and revenue generated. That is being bankrolled by a recent US$63 million (RM269 million) funding, which also helped pay for the soiree, attended by executives from big industry names such as Google, Sequoia Capital and Zalora.

App Annie is going where the demand is. Spending on mobile apps in Asia is expected to surge 24 per cent to US$28.3 billion this year — double that of the Americas — as rising incomes spur smartphone use in markets such as Indonesia. With more than 150 workers in China, where the company got its start before relocating to San Francisco, the Singapore expansion will help it measure the users in the region who are bypassing earlier technologies.

“Devices are getting cheaper and many consumers are experiencing their first Internet experience through an app in smartphones,” said Bertrand Schmitt, the company’s founder. “Asia Pacific is already big and it keeps getting bigger. For us, that makes the region very exciting as a market. Revenue and downloads, growth are expected to be big.”

App Annie expects China to overtake the United States this year to become the largest single app market with an estimated US$11.8 billion in revenue.

The surging number of mobile devices and people going online through apps for the first time are fuelling Asia’s mobile software arena, said Avinash Sundaram, a research manager for enterprise mobility at IDC in Singapore.

App Annie — derived from App Nanny, to imply it takes care of all things app — is mostly unknown outside of tech circles yet counts the biggest names in the industry among its customers. It competes with Yahoo’s Flurry and Apptopia, making money by collating data from different sources and then signing up clients for subscriptions of US$10,000 to more than US$1 million a year. — Bloomberg