Instagram, everyone’s favorite filtered photo sharing app, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $7 million round led by Matt Cohler from Benchmark Capital with participation from big-name individual investors: Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and CEO of Square; Adam D’Angelo, former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora; and Chris Sacca, former Google employee and Twitter investor. Seed-stage investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures also participated.Since launching four months ago, Instagram has seen over 1.75 million people register for the service, 78 million likes doled out by users, and over a half million tags in under a week. Instagram had hit one million users in December, so it looks like their growth is stable, though not necessarily phenomenal. The service sees 290,000 photos posted per day, but the announcement doesn’t say how many photos have been uploaded in total.
And now the company is looking to take things further, though details are slim at the moment:
“At Instagram, the depth of our ambition lies in the goal to change the way we see the world – to connect people from near and far and enable anyone with a camera to tell their story through a rich visual dialogue,” writes Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom on the company blog.
Of course, using a camera to tell a story “through a rich visual dialogue” is arguably a lot easier when you can shoot video, but Instagram still shows no outward signs of preparing a video tool for launch. If they did enter the space, however, they’d likely steal a lot of potential users from smaller, similar apps like iSupr8, a vintage video app we featured last month.
“Our new capital,” Systrom continues, “will also allow us to scale to the opportunity we've been handed across a variety of platforms on mobile and the web. We've got some groundbreaking stuff in the pipeline that changes the way we see and consume what's happening in our world.”
As a company, Instagram has doubled its team from two to four, but it’s trying to stay lean and efficient. Still, according to the company’s job page, they’re looking for a couple new hires: an iPhone software engineer and a “visual & experience” designer.
“At Instagram, the depth of our ambition lies in the goal to change the way we see the world – to connect people from near and far and enable anyone with a camera to tell their story through a rich visual dialogue,” writes Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom on the company blog.
Of course, using a camera to tell a story “through a rich visual dialogue” is arguably a lot easier when you can shoot video, but Instagram still shows no outward signs of preparing a video tool for launch. If they did enter the space, however, they’d likely steal a lot of potential users from smaller, similar apps like iSupr8, a vintage video app we featured last month.
“Our new capital,” Systrom continues, “will also allow us to scale to the opportunity we've been handed across a variety of platforms on mobile and the web. We've got some groundbreaking stuff in the pipeline that changes the way we see and consume what's happening in our world.”
As a company, Instagram has doubled its team from two to four, but it’s trying to stay lean and efficient. Still, according to the company’s job page, they’re looking for a couple new hires: an iPhone software engineer and a “visual & experience” designer.
