Take Mobile Pictures, Get Paid. Foap Raises $2.3M To Continue Growth.


    If you take pride in your photos and if you’re creative enough to fill up your instagram feeds with more than just shots of your Cappuccino, then you might as well get paid for it. That’s the idea behind Malmö-founded Foap, sort of a crowdsourced stock photo site that also allows marketers get some of that always-needed brand engagement.

    The company has announced that they’ve raised a fresh $2.3 million in funding from some interesting names like CNN Worldwide President, Jeff Zucker; CEO and Co-Founder of VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk; Upshot Chairman and Protagonist LLC Partner, Jordan Rednor; and CEO of Delivery Hero, Niklas Ostberg, among others. The company’s total funding now stands at roughly $5 million but they’re not quite ready to call this a Series A yet.

    Growth seems to be good for the company on the user side – they’ve announced approximately 500,000 total users since 2012 and 300,000 photo uploads every week. There’s plenty of garbage pictures being uploaded in there of course, so Foap’s strategy has been to get users to keep the quality high themselves – users have to rate 5 photos and have their own photo rated before its available for purchase.

    On the demand side they’re not sharing any numbers in this recent press release, but they’ve kept the market price at a flat $10 per image since launching which suggests they haven’t found the need to drop the price. Additionally Foap allows brands to harness the platform for “Missions” where marketers can hype up the community to take photos of their brands in a certain context to be used in advertising or social media campaigns. It hits all the keywords like brand activation, crowdsourcing, and social media, which is why the company has been able to run 200 missions from Fortune 500 companies and brand advertising agencies since it released the concept in 2013.

    “I know the value of Foap’s offering firsthand, having been one of the company’s early adopters,” said Vaynerchuk. “By creating a marketplace of user-generated, authentic photography, Foap offers brands real images at a fraction of the cost of traditional stock photography but with an exponentially higher rate of engagement. Foap’s CEO David Los is answering a crucial market need with this offering and I’m excited to be a part of the company’s future.”