Vebbler Launches Social Camera App and Raises $500K Funding from a Syndicate of 16 Investors
Vebbler has launched a new photo app for groups, and aims to become the largest consumer-internet app coming out of India. It has also raised an angel round of $500,000 from a syndicate of 16 investors from different countries including India, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US, using the Let’s Venture platform. The lead investors include Anupam Mittal Founder & CEO of People Group, Sharad Sharma Co-Founder of iSpirt, Venkat Raju CEO of Kyron Accelerator, Pranav Pai & Siddarth Pai Founding Partners of 3one4 Capital and others.
Vebbler is a camera-first app designed to make sharing of photos easy between groups at night outs, vacations and celebrations. While people love taking photos together, the process of later sending them to each other is extremely cumbersome, and Vebbler promises to make that happen in one single-tap. With Vebbler, sending and receiving photos will become a breeze and no one will require begging and bugging friends to send photos via instant messaging apps, USB drives or cloud folders anymore. What’s more – one can express themselves on each photo through stunning filters, quick captions and candid reactions.
It has launched cross-platform on Android and iOS. Vebbler has already garnered 50,000+ early sign-ups before the launch, with hundreds of colleges and students eagerly awaiting its launch.
The idea struck Sahil Bhagat, CEO and Founder, Vebbler when he was in college. He adds, “Vebbler was always built as a platform for people to share moments with private groups, or as we call it – Clubs. More recently, we shifted our focus to mobile. As an account of personal experience, during college, frequent night outs and spontaneous trips were very common, and we’d take hundreds of photos from our phones, only to undergo the mechanical and pain-staking process of sending our moments with each other afterward. As a result, we’d be left with an incomplete picture of the story most of the times. It is then that I realized that there had to be a better way for people to stitch together photos and videos of everyday moments of their lives.”
One of Vebbler’s lead investors, Anupam Mittal, Founder & CEO, People Group said, “The investment in Vebbler is a part of, perhaps, the most ambitious initiative by an Indian start-up to build a global consumer Tech Company. They are addressing a unique unarticulated need faced by most digital natives in the world and I am happy to partner them in this exciting journey.”
Vebbler’s Major USPS:
Camera-First: Instantly share photos with one or multiple clubs directly from the camera.
One-Time or On-Going: Perfect for one-time events like road trips and music concerts, or recurring moments like those your college friends and family.
Real-Time: A live timeline for each club that stitches together all photos taken through your friends’ phones as soon as they are captured.
Private: Vebbler is private, enabling you to share moments that you’d probably not share on other public platforms, allowing you to always be yourself – candid and real.
Community Focused: Vebbler isn’t a photo management app that organizes your photos based on location or facial recognition. They are a camera app that’s social by design, allowing people to instantly share photos with each other in real-time.
Another lead investor Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder iSprit said, “I think photos and videos are an increasingly powerful medium for communication that surpasses the limitations of language and geography, especially in a country like India. Vebbler has built a great platform to connect groups and provide them a powerful tool to share and express themselves in new ways and that is very exciting to me.”
“As early-stage investors, we enjoy working with founders of product companies because they prove, by personal example that the intersection of passion, capability, perseverance, and lateral thinking leads to impressive results. This is a young team that will try everything possible to work with their core users to arrive at the best solution, and that is a fantastic process to be a part of.” added Pranav Pai Founding Partner 3one4 Capital.
CEO of Kyron Accelerator Venkat Raju said, “Collaboration and “group app” has produced great winners (Whatsapp, Slack etc.) and still a very large, untapped market. Here comes Vebbler, a visual sharing app. Finally, a consumer internet product company out of India set to conquer the global market.”
Vebbler was founded in June 2013 by Sahil Bhagat and is based in Bangalore. It is a new social camera for groups. Vebbler is building out the product in a way that makes it the default camera on the smartphone.
