AppTweak, an app store optimisation (ASO) player, closed a $500,000 round of funding to expand its sales and development team and improve its app store intelligence with new features and functionality.

AppTweak will also use the funding to develop business and engineering capabilities to grow and improve its platform, which provides an automated and personalised ASO report for any app in stores.

“In order to help smaller app developers struggling to get their app known, AppTweak provides both easy-to-use and powerful weapons to monitor, build and iterate their ASO strategy”, said co-founder Olivier Verdin.

“AppTweak seeks to level the playing field by equipping indies and small to medium-size app studios to compete with the dominant players and help them go global in the process”, he added.

Launched in August 2014 in Belgium, AppTweak says its platform experienced 21 per cent monthly growth in the last 13 months and has 400 accounts in more than 40 countries, 42 per cent of which are in Europe.

The company provides a multilingual keyword tool based on a “homemade” dictionary using native and optimised keywords in six different languages: English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Portuguese.

It claims to be the only ASO company that provides native keywords in several languages and plans to use the funds to “pave the way for the integration of additional languages”.

“AppTweak is clearly leading the ASO competition in Europe. This round of funding will help AppTweak to leverage on more languages and increase their reach on the European market”, says Claire Munck, CEO at Be Angels, one of the investors.