Phhhoto, the photo-booth event company turned social app, has today announced a new group feature called Party.
The new feature will allow users to share Phhhoto’s GIF-style moving photos as group messages, both privately among friends or through the larger Phhhoto community.
The company has also announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round, led by Eniac Ventures, with support from WME and Maveron. This brings total funding to $1.75 million, with Diplo coming on as an angel investor. The company hasn’t needed to take much outside investment given that it launched as an enterprise product called Phhhoto Pro, which continues to grow, according to the company.
Phhhoto started out as an iPad application, paired with a flash-enabled mount, that took a few frames of party-goers at professional events, strung the frames together as a moving photo, and texted the link to the user’s phone number.
The team quickly realized that people wanted to use the Phhhoto software on their own, as opposed to solely at parties and events, and so the Phhhoto app was born.
As of March 2015, the company had over a million registered users over the nine month period since launch, with over 10 million Phhhotos posted. Last month, the company launched an Android version of the app.
With Party, Phhhoto has found a way to add both public and private channels, which has something the app has always lacked. Save for a #wow section, which shows the most popular and awesome Phhhotos on the platform, the Phhhoto app existed as a single feed of people you actively followed.
Party gives users the ability to share these channels with their friends and family privately, but it also allows them to create their own public channels (‘parties’) that could eventually become searchable, offering more explore functionality into the app.