Foap Raises $1.5 Million With Traction in Branded Photo Missions


    Malmö-based Foap, an Instagram-meets-stockphoto concept, announces today they’ve picked up a cool $1.5 million (€1.13 million) in funding from Swedish VC Industrifonden and Maxwell Ventures. With it comes a new website design and some good news about traction from brands for photo missions.

    Aside from a crowdsourced iPhone stock-photo site, The company allows brands to engage their customers by running photo missions. There, brands like MANGO, Puma, Lavazza, and Visit Sweden can promote a photo competition on their social media and through the Foap app to get users to take pictures of their products to be used in marketing material.

    David Los, co-founder, of Foap tells us that Mago ran a photo competition recently, and received 4,500 photos in 7 days. “And the content is really good. Not random photography,” explains Los.

    Winners can receive anything from cash prizes to gift cards. Puma, for instance, gave $2000 for the winner, while MANGO offered gift cards. Aside from getting huge brand engagement, the main buzzword for corporate social media planners, these brands are also able to buy from this collection of stock photos built around their brand for $10 a piece.

    Their strategy right now is to get more international brands onboard, which will drive more downloads of the app. To do so, the company is setting up an office in New York, to be closer to the U.S. market.

    To look even better to these international brands, the company is also releasing an Andorid version this September.

    With more users onboard, they should be able to build up the pure stock photo portion of their site, where users can upload photos of anything and sell them. Today they already have 5.7 million photos indexed. Each shot runs $10 each, with $5 going to the photographer and $5 to the company.

    Foap is getting competition in the Nordics as well, with Helsinki-based Scoopshot also launching these same brand and stock photos features. Traditionally Scoopshot focused on crowdsourcing photos for breaking news, but seems to find value in Foap’s angle.

    “This round is the most important in the short history of the company. We’re at a point where we need to maintain the growth we’ve experience so far and to build on this even further. Taking our first steps into the US is a major part of this and we’re looking forward to working with more brands to help them reward their community of fans” says Los.

    Foap’s app can be found in the app store.

    Foap Missions from Foap on Vimeo.