KeepSafe, which creates a password-locked photo gallery on people’s phones, just raised $3.4 million in a round led by Floodgate. They’ve also grown to 13 million users, 6 million of whom are active every month.
This is probably not a perfect way of putting it, but one could argue that KeepSafe attacks a market that overlaps a little bit with Snapchat. Many of the reviews for KeepSafe on the Google Play market say things like, “The best to hide hot pics” or “Great if you have kids and a spicy sex life with your wife.”
So it seems that there is an audience of parents who often let their kids borrow and play with their phones, but don’t want them to see more adult content.
That said, the app’s founder, Zouhair Belkoura, has always said that he and most other users rely on KeepSafe for more mundane things like separating out work sketches and ideas from personal photos of friends and family.
Most privacy-centric social networks and photo-sharing apps that I’ve seen have had trouble growing and competing with Facebook or Instagram, but KeepSafe seems to solve a basic problem that many people and parents want fixed.
The app was only launched a year and a half ago, and 6 million monthly actives is not a bad place to be right now.
With the round, Mike Maples of Floodgate will join the company’s board. Existing investors like Asset Management and Strive also participated.
KeepSafe will use the funding to hire more engineering and product development talent. They earn revenue through selling premium services like providing a fake PIN lock screen. (One wonders why someone would want to pay for a fake PIN lock screen in addition to a normal PIN screen, but maybe we live in an extra paranoid society where people have things they want to double-protect.)