Timehop, a startup that humbly began as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, has just bagged a $1.1 million round of seed funding by OATV (Bryce Roberts) and followed on by Spark Capital (Andrew Parker) and a pretty worthy list of angels including Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Alex Rainert, Groupme’s Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin. Timehop was part of the TechStars NYC winter class.
The startup started out aggregating Foursquare user checkins from a year ago in a daily email and recently broadened to include Facebook status updates, photos, Twitter updates and Instagram posts.
It’s actually pretty amazing that Crowley and Sevadurai have gone in, as the startup was created at a Foursquare hackathon about a year ago. “I love what those guys are doing and I love that it’s one of the first breakout apps using our API,” Crowley said on why he invested. He also tweeted out this pretty humorous explanation about why he likes the service yesterday (before the funding was announced).
My @timehop daily email just made me literally LOL. (on a checkin from 12 months ago, "smells like cats in here")—
Dennis Crowley (@dens) January 23, 2012
“We’re building Timehop into the best way of recording, remembering, and reconnecting around our digital histories,” co-founder Jonathan Wegener told me, “The data exhaust of today’s services can tell your life story, but so far this data remains disaggregated and silo’d across devices and services. The ‘history’ sections of most websites leave a lot to be desired and represent an opportunity to build a service that helps you celebrate the past and reconnect with others around it.”
Sure some have pointed out that Timehop really doesn’t solve a problem (there’s a whole Quora thread on it here). To that Wegener responds, “Asking what ‘problem’ Timehop solves may be asking the wrong question. That’s the equivalent of asking “what problem do photographs solve?” Clearly taking photos is a mainstream and frequent activity, but it doesn’t really solve a ‘problem’ but rather scratches a deeply human itch. Timehop scratches that same itch.”
Wegener plans on using the funding to add another two or three engineers to the Timehop team and further integrating the product with other services.
The startup started out aggregating Foursquare user checkins from a year ago in a daily email and recently broadened to include Facebook status updates, photos, Twitter updates and Instagram posts.
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