David Bloom (Forbes)
Lapse, a three-year-old photo-sharing app, announced it raised $30 million in Series A funding from a group of prominent venture-capital firms and angel investors led by Greylock and DST Global Partners. Greylock general partner Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive, joined Lapse’s board.
“Lapse has captured the hearts and minds of a generation who isn’t sharing their lives with friends on other social platforms,” Andreou said in a release. “This is a testament to Lapse’s founders Ben and Dan (Silvertown), who are a unique blend of art and science, and obsessed with building an authentic experience for young people to capture moments and share memories.”
The raise represents a particularly hefty show of financial support at a time when high interest rates have choked off access to VC money for many startups. The key, suggested Dan Silvertown in an interview, is the company’s very different approach to the notion of being a modern social-media app, focused on “friends, not followers.”
The app has gone through a couple of major iterations, but is notable because it doesn’t allow users to immediately see photos they take, instead holding off making the images available while they “develop” for one to three hours. The delayed-gratification approach is inspired by film-based disposable cameras, much as Silvertown’s brother and co-founder Ben used during a 2021 trip to Vietnam.
The “development” delay for images “allows (users) to stay in the moment and keep enjoying that experience,” Dan Silvertown said. “Instead of taking 50 angles, it takes you back to disposable cameras, where you take some photos and then put the camera away and prioritize the experience.”
Once the image is available, the app doesn’t allow any fiddling around with endless editing tools, freeing the user from any expectations of creating a perfected image. When an image is presented, the user swipes right to share to friends on the app, left to archive, or delete. It simplifies the photo app to its bare essentials.
The app does apply a dozen different enhancements to the developed image, adding such film-like touches as lens flares and grain, even halation or color bleeding around bright light sources, Silvertown said.
“We always felt it was really important to have a look, a unique look,” Silvertown said. “We wanted to have an aesthetic that was unique.”
Lapse’s approach may be a well-timed orthogonal digression from the dominant ways that billions of people use more traditional social-media tools. After photos are taken in those apps, the user typically dives into editing, twiddling the image with seemingly endless tools using artificial intelligence and computational photography functions. The resulting images are optimized, but frequently look highly manipulated and even inauthentic.
“The direction we’re moving is actually perpendicular to where the general market is moving,” Silvertown said. “We believe it’s a lot more satisfying. AI gives a double-edged sword, with the ability to create massive amounts of content. But the photos (created with AI) are not particularly satisfying. It’s not a real memory you’re solidifying. The image doesn’t tell you anything about the person who made it or what was going on when it was taken.”
Editing tools are available in the app, in the Lab section, but only if the image is being exported for other uses. Those tools include cropping and removal of the watermark the app applies to shared images.
The London-based Lapse will use the funding round to modestly expand its 20-person workforce, but remain focused on further improvements to the app experience, Silvertown said.
The company has raised a total of $42 million, including the Series A round, and is still building out the experience and user base, with no immediate investor pressure to make money, Silvertown said. When it comes time to generate revenue, the company will consider such common approaches as ads, in-app purchases and subscriptions.
Participants in the Series A also included re-ups from earlier rounds by GV, which is Alphabet’s venture fund, SpeedInvest, and Octopus Ventures, and angel investors Soleio, Naveen Gavini, Nima Khajehnouri, and Praveen Murugesan. The latter three are former senior executives from Pinterest, Snap and Uber, respectively.
Original Article