Netscape founder and HP and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, who has been involved in a number of hot new start-ups such as RockMelt, has joined the board of up-and-coming firm Mixed Media Labs, the firm behind the photo-sharing app Picplz.
A creator of apps for the iPhone and Android smartphone market, Mixed Media Labs has raised US$5m in Series A investment led by Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. As part of the investment, he will be joining the board of the company.
Mixed Media Labs is behind a hot new photo broadcasting app called Picplz, one of the few photo-sharing apps currently available on the Android Market.
Picplz is poised for major growth on the basis of Android being the No 2 and fastest-growing operating system in the smartphone market, with a 25.5pc marketshare, according to Gartner.
The app lets users add effects to their images for free. Current effects include “Instant Film,” “Russian Toy Camera,” “the 70s” and “High Contrast Monochrome.” Pictures taken with picplz are synced to a profile on picplz.com and tagged with the location, making it possible for anyone to browse all photos taken in a given city or specific check-in location. Users can also post directly from the app to Facebook and Twitter, as well as check in to Foursquare.
“We are excited to be working with Andreessen Horowitz,” Dalton Caldwell of Mixed Media Labs said announcing the funding.
“Marc and Ben (Horowitz) have a strong technical and operational background that will undoubtedly help us build Mixed Media Labs into a great company. Start-ups are a team sport, and I see a shared vision between the Marc and Ben’s team-oriented approach with ours.
“The past nine months have been a fun ride: We’ve formed a company; defined our first product; wrote our first line of code; raised an angel round; hired a core team; shipped a 1.0 to the public (with updates and new code rolling out continuously); raised a series A, all while constantly improving the product across three discrete platforms (iPhone, Android, web) and learning a great deal during the entire process,” Caldwell said.
