Lapse app turns your phone into an old-school camera

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The Lapse app, which turns your phone into an old-school camera, raises $30 million.

It may be expensive in 2024 to find an analog camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it, and take photos that you then have to pay to have developed. However, the experience had a charm and simplicity. For those longing for those old days, a startup called Lapse is giving smartphone users an alternative – you take photos that you have to wait to see “developed,” without any editing or retouching, before sharing them with a select group of friends if you wish.

Lapse has gained some traction in the market — touting millions of users, 100 million photos taken each month, and a coveted, consistent top-ten ranking in the US app store for photography apps. Now it’s announcing a new $30 million funding round to take its ambitions to the next level.

Greylock — the consumer app investor legend that was an early backer of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (when it was Musical.ly) and LinkedIn — joined as a partner in the round alongside equally iconic DST Global Partners. Previous investors including GV, Octopus Ventures and Speedinvest also participated. Following a previous $12.4 million raised in 2021, this brings the total to just over $42 million and a valuation of around $150 million, according to sources.

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Lapse's plans include more processing of "unaltered" photos in the background, adding more features around the photography experience, and an eventual move into video.

There may still be some commercialization in the future, CEO and co-founder Dan Silvertown said in an interview. While that’s not something he’s touched on yet, he’s looking to move away from the usual path of ad-dependent social apps. “The feeling and the initial premise is not to do that,” he said.

The company's ethos may have an old-fashioned feel, but some of the mechanics of how the app works are anything but.

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Silvertown, who co-founded the app with his brother Ben while traveling in Asia, preferred to remain desirable for the freedom of a camera that doesn't tie him down to constantly looking at an app to see who "liked" his photos, or what other people are doing, and above all, seems to lead his life away from capturing and sharing the moment on an app. This led him and Dan to look at how to replicate the analog experience via smartphone.

While there's no room in the app for editing photos or constantly retaking shots if you're not happy with the result initially, there is some interesting processing that happens in the background.

“There are about 12 different steps that a photo goes through in terms of editing,” he said. Some of them have computer image recognition elements, and some were built in-house, and some use third-party technology. All of these, essentially, aim to understand what’s in the image you’re taking and are designed to optimize how the subjects and the overall composition look as a result. (Note: For those who export photos to other apps, there are a number of editing features you can use to manipulate the image yourself, but these are not for sharing in Lapse as is.)

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On the other hand, some of the mechanical points in the application are not so great.

Lapse has come under some scrutiny for how it used growth-hacking and forced invites to expand its app installs. This technique certainly worked to increase user numbers – it reached the top of the US and UK iOS app stores (the only market and platform where it’s available) at one point, though it’s questionable how sustainable or user-friendly this can be for any company in the long run if the app doesn’t offer anything useful and interesting to keep you hanging around.

For Lapse, the lesson was certainly instructive, though it still defends that the startup had to start somewhere: Given that the intention is to have a way to share your photos with a small group of friends without a discovery feed, if you download the app and don't have any contacts who use it, what do you do?

In recent days, he claims that the app — which has gained more “calendar” features, offering users a way to essentially build albums that you can keep private or share with a small group of people — no longer requires pushy invitations to use, largely because there is now a critical mass of people and it is finding its own viral spread.

However, my own experience has been that for completely new users – perhaps especially consumers who are sensitive about sharing data on social apps they don’t already know – it’s still difficult to sort through the app’s murky patterns to figure out how to use it without sharing at least a few names and numbers.

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One piece of data breached by one person, and you’ve lost trust too soon. (“Bye, Lapse!” one of my most frustrated and annoyed friends told me when I asked her to download the app to connect with me.)

Which brings us to another important point: We’re at a major crossroads in the world of consumer apps these days. Consumers have become increasingly aware of what they’re giving up when they use most consumer apps (a lot of personal data, basically). Yes, the most dominant names in the industry are massive in scale with billions of users, but for the most part — Snapchat being perhaps the biggest exception — they’ve moved well beyond a focus on sharing with small groups of friends, and none of them are without a host of accompanying features that take users away from what feels real anymore. Some of the most popular apps, in fact, seem to be slowing down in terms of growth and engagement.

Does this leave an opportunity for at least some players who are willing to give users a simpler alternative? BeReal, Dispo, and a few others who have tackled this idea seem to have lost some steam at the moment, but Lapse still believes there's a lot more to come for its approach to the concept.

And it seems that its investors believe it too:

“What’s so interesting is that most of the high-scale platforms, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, a lot of them originally started life as places where we would keep our friends updated, and then slowly ended up becoming something different, as we know them today,” like sites for news, or entertainment, or to keep influencers updated, Jacob Andreou, general partner at Greylock, said in an interview.

“I think what’s interesting about this is that it’s left a void where there’s no place you can go to just look at your friends’ profiles, see what they’re up to. They’re interested. That’s also an amazing place to start, because that’s where all these really big platforms started.” He believes that the photographic mechanics of “taking a photo, once, and viewing it later when the photo is developed, can lower the sharing, using it to create this amazing place where you can stay up to date with your friends.

Source: techcrunch