Flashgap, the time-delayed photo-sharing app inspired by the movie ‘The Hangover,’ has closed a $1.5 million seed round — money the French startup plans to use to launch across the pond. This will include recruiting a U.S. based team, in addition to expanding the app’s features.
Despite not making public the list of investors — backers are described as private French and American investors — Flashgap is disclosing its valuation: $5.6 million (presumably post-money). It isn’t, however, revealing MAUs or other meaningful metrics, except to say that six months since launching in the U.K. over 2 million photos and videos have been uploaded to the app.
Available for iOS and Android, in many ways Flashgap resembles other collaborative photo album-sharing apps. It enables you to create a photo album tied to an event, invite others to contribute their photos, and share the resulting album with the group as a whole. However, all of the photos remain hidden until midday the following day, when they unlock so that the previous night’s horrors can be re-lived by all.
The inspiration behind the time-delayed photo-sharing concept was Hollywood movie The Hangover. “The movie inspired us to create an app where in an event no one has access to the photos taken by friends or themselves. Letting the next day at 12 hours be a discovery of every photo taken for all the participants,” Flashgap co-founder and CEO Julian Kabab told TechCrunch last December.
“We’ve had great early success in Europe and judging off the popularity of Flashgap for events, we believe that it could become of common use among people in their 20’s for parties, weddings, concerts or any type of moments,” Kabab adds in a statement.
“The real objective of a startup is to stand out and swim the other way, change the user experience and establish a new product in everyone’s daily habits. Flashgap’s differentiation lies in the surprise generated by sharing the discovery of every picture the next day at the same time. The app is really about enabling you to relive the best moments from nights out with friends without needing to censor yourself on social networks because you might not look perfect or something embarrassing happened. It all just stays between you and your group of close friends.”
The latter is in reference to Flashgap’s recently added privacy features, including the ability to create ‘closed’ albums. Other feature added since we last wrote about the app are the ability to comment on photos and the option to connect groups via third-party social and messaging platforms.