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Snappr raises US$10m, flags video and VR tours

On-demand professional photography platform, Snappr, has raised US$10 million in Series A funding, which will be used to expand into new markets and develop features like videography and 360-degree virtual tours.

Snappr photographer, Paul Stonehouse, with Snappr CEO, Matt Schiller. Source: Crunchbase.

This latest round of funding was led by AI and automation-focused venture capital firm, Basis Set Ventures. Two other investment firms also jumped on board: YesVC, headed by Flickr’s founder Caterina Fake; and Y Combinator, a previous Snappr investor which offered seed funding in 2017 provided the fledgling Sydney start-up relocate to San Francisco.

According to business news outlet, Crunchbase, the funding will be used to build ‘out offerings for large businesses and enterprises’; as well as moving into video and virtual tours, along with market expansion. The press releases states that Snappr’s biggest growth area is B2B (business-to-business) and enterprise clients.

For the uninitiated, Snappr is a kind-of Uber for professional photography – customers book a photo shoot, and a vetted Snappr photographer is allocated the job. Photo shoots are cheap – from US$89, and photographers take a small cut of the winnings. They’re also expected to be available in as little as two hours. Plenty has been said about what it’s like to work as a Snappr photographer, and how the business may harm the industry by devaluing photography. Dig through the Inside Imaging and ProCounter archive for more.

Snappr is making some glowing claims about its current performance. The service is available in over 200 US metropolitan areas, meaning ‘around 90 percent of the US population’ has access to Snappr photographers. As well as being available in Australia and New Zealand, Snappr has also spread into Canada, Singapore and recently launched in the UK.

Despite the pandemic, Snappr is apparently experiencing record demand for its services, with the lads expecting September to be the best month ever. This achievement is more impressive when considering that Snappr’s web traffic has dropped by over 50 percent in six months, according to web analytics comparison tool, SimilarWeb. According to its web traffic measurements, Snappr went from 100,000 total visits in March 2020, to just 45,000 in August 2020.

According to SimilarWeb data, US visitors account for 59 percent of Snappr’s web traffic, followed by Australia at 26 percent. Source: SimilarWeb.

A Snappr strong point during the pandemic has been the sudden switch to e-commerce. Apparently a whopping 12 percent of all US restaurants have had photos captured by a Snappr photographer.

‘We saw a huge surge in demand, especially from business customers who are scrambling to put their best foot forward online,’ said Matt Schiller, Snappr founder and CEO, to CrunchBase.

Not only that, but more than 50 percent of all Fortune 500 companies – the 500 largest US companies according to Fortune Magazine – have scrounged together a few shekels for some Snappr photos.

‘The beauty of our platform is that we provide photographers with a consistent flow of work and the kind of work they may have never done before,’ said Matt Schiller, Snappr founder, to CrunchBase. ‘With some of the enterprise clients, we work across hundreds of markets at one time, so there is no way one photographer would get that kind of work alone.’

This latest round of investment funding follows Snappr’s acquisition of Eversnap, a wedding photo sharing app.

Here’s a list of Key Quotes from the press release.

‘Our first encounter with Snappr was a birthday party photoshoot, but on meeting Matt and the team our jaw dropped when we saw their list of B2B clients. It really is the who’s who of marketplaces and enterprises.’ – Lan Xuezhao, who led Basic Set Ventures’ investment.

‘Besides its great team and limitless potential, I may have also been attracted to Snappr because of its lack of an “e”! One of the avenues we did not pursue with Flickr but which is enormously fruitful is B2B. This Snappr is doing with great success.’ – Flickr founder, Caterina Fake.

‘The world is filled with incredible photographers but most of them lack a platform to easily market themselves, particularly to businesses, and spend the majority of their time on the admin and tedious editing tasks that Snappr automates. When I first saw Snappr’s platform my experience from Airbnb told me this was the future of the professional photography market.’ – Y Combinator partner, Gustaf Alströmer.

2 Comments

  1. Orlando Sydney Orlando Sydney October 8, 2020

    Always good to read what others are doing and saying in this space.
    That SimilarWeb graph looks like the same trajectory as the one I used in my review earlier in the year.
    Falling site visitor numbers results in increased bookings, and without a sales team too. That makes it very news worthy. If you can believe what you read in the news that is.

    Hopefully this push for low cost photography helps their photographers in the US, base wage is fairly low there.

    Is it common to add a little hype to help secure more funding?

    As I mention elsewhere, ATO just may be looking very closely at the status of their “employee” photographers. Are they an emanation of snappr?

    Orlando

  2. Trevor Connell Trevor Connell October 9, 2020

    Until they pay photographers professional rates I think it is a bit rich to refer to Snappr as an “On-demand professional photography platform,”

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