Mobile Sharing App Quilt Launches With Backing From Facebook Co-Founder Andrew McCollum

As the social world evolves, users are increasingly seeking new ways to share moments with friends and family that don’t involve uploading content that everyone in their social networks can see. Rather than post things to Facebook or Twitter, more social applications like Path are popping up that limit the size of the networks and make sharing a bit more intimate. There’s also couples apps, which reduce sharing to just one other person.

But while limiting who sees content, these apps still have a one-sized fits all approach to sharing. In order to provide more flexibility around who sees what content, a new startup called Quilt has emerged to allow users to more precisely define whom users are sharing with. To do so, the company has raised a $500,000 seed round, including funds from Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum.

Quilt bills itself as a “real-time digital scrapbook built by close family and friends.” The app allows users to create “Quilts,” which “stitch together” moments from their lives, providing granular sharing and privacy settings along the way. Within each Quilt, users can designate which members of their social circles they’d like to invite, and who they’d like to share with — whether those memories can only be seen by members of the group, or whether they’re available to the broader public.

Users can create as many Quilts as they’d like, sharing their thoughts, checkins, and photos within the group. They can be built to highlight special occasions, or document ongoing friendships or relationships. They can also decide when a Quilt is complete and be able to view those memories on other platforms, like tablets and PCs.

According to co-founder Austin Cooley, the idea behind Quilt was not built as just a group photo-sharing app, but as a “storytelling device” for groups of friends. By making Quilts collaborative, the idea is to extend the fundamental sharing unit out from just one person out to an entire group. As such, the app and its networks are meant to be complementary to existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Quilt is available for both the iPhone and Android devices, letting users share with friends across multiple devices. To start, it’s aiming at capturing the college market, due to that demographic’s comfort level of sharing through mobile devices.

In addition to McCollum, Energent Ventures, David Whitney, Randy Scott, and other angels also invested in Quilt’s seed round. McCollum is also an advisor to the startup, along with Tim Van Damme, Brady Brim-DeForest, and Josh Greenberg.