For the first time since Google GOOGL -0.89%, venture capitalists and billionaires Michael Moritz and John Doerr have just joined the same startup’s board: Flipagram, a storytelling app where users can make music video-like clips with photos and videos.
The free, two-year-old social app announced on Thursday that it raised $70 million in a Series B round, led by Sequoia and joined by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Index Ventures. Flipagram also said Moritz and Doerr are new additions to its board of directors. The app appears to be making a push to position itself as the social app that is best integrated with music. Flipagram also revealed it has secured deals with several major music labels and publishers, creating what it calls a ”comprehensive catalog” of millions of song clips, which users can include as soundtracks behind videos or buy through the app.
Flipagram, based in Los Angeles, Calif., had more 3o million monthly active users by the end of 2014, although it hasn’t released more recent figures. The app allows you to quickly combine photos, videos, links, text and music into short, edited video clips that are about thirty seconds long on average and can run up to one minute, longer than Vine or Instagram videos, but shorter than Facebook or YouTube videos, which often last several minutes. Flipagram’s goal is to allow users to make videos with narrative and emotional depth, while at the same time being extremely fast and easy to use, Mohit said. Flipagram plans to use its new funding primarily to attract top talent and support the infrastructure required to run the app, cofounder and CEO Farhad Mohit told FORBES.
Comparing Flipagram to other social apps, Mohit said YouTube videos can offer more involved narratives, but are usually more difficult and intimidating to make. On the other side of what Mohit described as a ”deep-to-shallow,” “easy-to-hard” spectrum, Twitter and Instagram are focused on quickly capturing individual moments, or in the case of Snapchat, glimpsing them temporarily. Mohit said Flipagram has a different use-case than all of the above. Flipagram, he said, is geared toward memorializing events — like a wedding, graduation, or party — or making a self-expressive collage that are built to be saved and can be shared with friends or celebrities. As a result, the creation process on Flipagram is a little bit more involved than sending a tweet or a snap, he said. However, features like the video editor, which automatically breaks down users’ videos into one-second clips that they can quickly string together, make the process easy. Songs and photos can be added with a few taps, and the finished clip, called a Flipagram, can be shared, liked and commented on both within the app and elsewhere online.
Before starting Flipagram, Mohit founded shopping search engines Shopzilla, which was acquired for $525-million in 2005. His intent with Flipagram is to bring it to the masses, both by working around language as a barrier to sharing, and by making the app extremely intuitive, he said.
“We believe that storytelling is the path to deeper connections on social media,” Mohit told FORBES. “We might be onto the narrative object for the billions.”
More than 14 million Flipagrams were created per month in the first quarter of 2015, the company said. The typical user is under the age of 25 and female, and the majority of Flipagrams are made internationally. On Thursday, the Flipagram ranked seventh in the U.S. photo and video app category on iOS, according to app analytics firm AppAnnie.
“The partners really believe that Flipagram will be a major media creation and sharing company, on the order of a Twitter or more,” Doerr told FORBES.
Courtesy Flipagram
Flipagram’s licensing deals involve major players such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Musicand and The Orchard, among others. According to Doerr, these deals make Flipagram a unique, competitive player in the social space.
“Farhad, to cut all of the deals and the arrangements with the owners and get these complicated rights is an amazing accomplishment, and you just can’t take it for granted,” Doerr told FORBES.
Mohit argues that for the music companies, the app isn’t a threat but a tool through which musicians can engage more immediately with fans, as well as an opportunity for artists to expose their music to more listeners. A song a friend uses in the background of a yoga or cooking video – how-to videos are popular on the app – might prompt you to pay for the song by following links Flipagram includes within the app to iTunes and Spotify. Flipagrams can also link to other outside sites.
“Universal Music Group has a long track record of working with innovative new digital services like Flipagram to engage fans and provide new commercial opportunities for our artists,” Francis Keeling, global head of digital business at Universal Music Group, said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to watching millions of Flipagram’s users express their creativity in videos set to our artists’ music.”
The Community
In addition to the everyday user, hundreds of celebrities and shakers are on Flipagram. The app said it doesn’t pay stars to join the app, and that their presence on the app grows mostly organically. Deepak Chopra, Jessica Alba, Jamie Foxx, Britney Spears, Garth Brooks and One Direction are among the app’s big names. If an artist or influencer likes a fan’s post, the app puts a badge on the user’s post showing which star liked it. Beyond searching for specific friends or stars, users can also find Flipagrams within a number of channels such as animals, humor, dance and music, selfies and besties, food, art, family, sports, health and fitness. Famous or not, any user can create a profile where they can save their Flipgrams or share posts to their followers. Companies and brands can also create accounts and Flipagrams.
“The first time you share a Flipagram, the first time you tell a story, you get that thrill of ‘Wow, I’m a storyteller,’” Mohit said. The thrill of being able to quickly make something meaningful could very well be what Flipagram needs to stand apart from the pack.
Correction: A previous version of this article said more than 14 million Flipagrams were created in the first quarter of 2015. In fact, more than 14 million Flipagrams were created per month during that quarter.
Link to original source article - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2015/07/17/video-storytelling-app-flipagram-raises-70-million-scores-major-music-deals/
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