Cinemagram Raises $8.5M Series A Led By Menlo Ventures To Make Mobile Photo Sharing More Animated


Darrell Etherington View Staff Page Follow me on twitter A writer focused on covering early-stage startups, especially those with a technology focus. → Learn More

posted 51 mins ago2CommentsCinemagram, a startup founded in Montreal that’s now moving to San Francisco, today announced an $8.5 million Series A round via AllThingsD. The investment comes from Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Real Ventures and Atlas, and stands as an exception to the decidedly reserved climate for follow-on capital after a startup’s seed round. So what’s Cinemagram’s secret?

The app is a cinemagraph generator. If you’re not familiar with the term, that’s basically a fancy GIF. The concept was popularized by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, fashion photographer who created the dramatic moving images which feature areas of movement in otherwise static scenes. Cinemagraph was among the first to bring this concept to mobile devices via an Instagram-style app, though the concept was also being developed by a Toronto-based studio around the same time and hit the App Store later as Flixel (which raised its first funding in July, though the amount wasn’t released). I’ve spoken with both teams, who have different visions about what users are looking for in this category of product.

Cinemagram seems to be winning out, with its focus on in-stream animated previews, and its early-mover advantage (though rival Kinoptic actually predated both it and Flixel). The app recently claimed a rate of growth of around 100,000 new users per day according to AllThingsD, and though that has since dropped to the tens of thousands, growth remains steady. The app also shifted earlier this year from a paid to a freemium model, following the introduction of Flixel which debuted as a free app, and that has likely helped its continued adoption.

A big part of Cinemagram’s appeal to investors, besides its similarity to previous superstar Instagram, is that it manages to be a way for users to share video-like content without the hassle involved in video. Few mobile video apps have managed to capture widespread consumer attention for very long, and for good reason: making video, even mobile ones, is a time-consuming process that involves a lot more work than snapping a photo. With Cineamagram, users get a product that is nearly as visually interesting as video, but also much easier to produce and consume – load times and bandwidth requirements are way below what you’d get with full mobile video. And refinements to the product, including frequent updates to help with image stabilization, mean that users can come on board quite easily and make their own “cines” (what Cinemagram calls its GIF-like images) quickly.

Cinemagram’s plans for the funding reportedly involve building out its backend to handle additional scale, according to co-founder Temo Chalasani speaking to AllThingsD. In a phone interview I conducted with Chalasani, he said that the company is actively and aggressively hiring new talent as well.

“We have some of the highest engagement in mobile social apps, and they saw what kind of a team we had and how we were able to make products and they invested in that,” Chalasani added, discussing how this round came together. “It was actually an extended, gradual process where we worked with our investors and they saw what we were capable of, rather than any one thing.”

The company behind Cinemagram, Factyle, raised $150,000 in seed funding from Real Ventures, and raised an additional $1 million convertible note during this past summer from the same investors who participated in this round. Menlo’s Shervin Pishevar also joins the Cinemagram board as part of the funding arrangement

Economic Impact Of Startup Accelerators: $1.6B+ Raised, 4,800+ Jobs Created, 2,000 Startups Funded


Rip Empson View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com Disclosure: I own shares in a technology-focused ETF, an index fund that includes Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Google, AT&T and Verizon, but I do not hold any individual investments in these or any other tech companies. → Learn More
posted 2 hours ago5CommentsToday, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, as Peter Relan said in a recent post (riffing on Chris Dixon), accelerators have become an industry segment in their own right. He also goes so far as to surmise that — just as it is for startups — 90 percent of accelerators are likely to fail.

Nonetheless, even if they fail, accelerators are still essential to the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems not only because they provide a petri dish for innovation, but because they create jobs. In an article on AllThingsD today, Jed Christiansen contends that the fundamental value of seed accelerators lies in their ability to both drive economic growth and foster an entrepreneurial culture within local communities.

Christiansen, along with being the Head of Channel Sales for Emerging Markets at Google is also the founder of Seed-DB, a database for seed accelerators and their startups, which he created in 2009 to track the up-tick of incubators and the startups they graduate. Today, the resource is tracking 134 seed accelerators in 33 countries.

Most notable, however, is the data that Christiansen has gleaned from Seed-DB on the impact of seed accelerator programs, starting with the fact that accelerators have funded over 2,000 startups, which have raised a total of $1.6 billion in funding. The founder, in turn, estimates that about 100 of these startups have already been sold for a total of approximately $1 billion and, perhaps most importantly, startups that have graduated from seed accelerators have created over 4,800 jobs.

Of course, Seed-DB’s data is to be taken with a grain of salt. The resource is incomplete, has compiled data on a fraction of startup exits (as many don’t report acquisition price) and it relies on startups and others to self-report (alongside the data it pulls from CrunchBase). However, Christiansen estimates that, were all accelerators to self-report, the total number of jobs created would in fact be closer to 7,000.

Startups, small businesses and accelerators are critical pistons in the engine of job creation; there are a few who would argue with that. However, research from the Kauffman Foundation puts into perspective just how important they are. It suggests that, between 1980 and 2005, all net job growth emanated from companies fewer than five-years-old. When it comes to how to best reverse an economic downturn, about the only thing you might find politicians agreeing on is the importance of supporting small businesses.

Not to say SMBs are the panacea, but they do play a critical role. For accelerators, it doesn’t matter whether or not all of their startups raise big rounds of venture capital, it matters how well their graduates can build a network of support for their peers and for future companies. The deeper and more robust it becomes, the more success startups find and the more jobs they collectively create.

Giving accelerators their due, Christiansen concludes: “From just one accelerator in 2005, to a handful in 2007, to over 130 around the world today, seed accelerators — and the jobs they create — are a positive change in the economic infrastructure of the technology industry.”

Tags: accelerators, incubators, funding, seed fund

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