YC-Funded DailyBooth Raises $1 Million From Sequoia, Kevin Rose, Ron Conway Et Al.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors.
Wall Street Journal blog Digits broke the news earlier this morning, and reported that DailyBooth has secured ‘roughly’ $1 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Betaworks, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.
In an interview with DailyBooth co-founders Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley, we learn that its users use the site like real-time poster child Twitter only with webcam-shot photos, which they say is in line with current trends of more personalization in short-form online communication means. The company says it’s currently receiving about six million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s reportedly still growing by about 35% a month. Talk about swift adoption and viralness.
The two men also went into the demographics a little, saying that the majority of its user base is located in the United Stated and other English-speaking countries such as the UK and Canada (which makes all the sense in the world, since the service isn’t multi-lingual yet). The majority of its users are 15-to-25 years old women, they add.
DailyBooth says it will use the extra cash to help them scale the service first and think about making money later on – currently they’re thinking in the direction of media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.
In conclusion: DailyBooth is growing fast, has gotten the attention and money from some of the nation’s most prolific and well-connected investors in real-time Internet startups and doesn’t appear to be all too worried with monetizing the service just yet.
Its co-founders were right: it is very much like Twitter.
Update: A couple more angels to announce: Former Googler and current Twitter advisor Chris Sacca and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia.