Photo Sharing App Poparazzi Reportedly Raising $20M Series A, Fresh Off Buzzy Launch

Photo sharing app Poparazzi is raising a $20 million Series A led by Benchmark, tech journalist Eric Newcomer and Forbes reported Thursday.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The reported funding news comes days after the app’s buzzy public launch, which vaulted it to the top of Apple’s App Store. The funding is for TTYL, the company that developed Poparazzi.

The raise could value Poparazzi at up to $135 million, Forbes reported, with Benchmark possibly investing $13.5 million for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Poparazzi encourages users to take and share photos of their friends. It doesn’t allow selfies, and a user’s profile is made up of photos they’re tagged in. (You can read more about how Poparazzi works here.)

TTYL, the startup behind the app, is based in Marina Del Rey, California, and raised a $2 million seed round in 2018, per Crunchbase data. The company is led by brothers Alex and Austen Ma, and has developed other apps such as TTYL, an audio-based social network.

Poparazzi follows on the heels of a couple of other much-hyped social media startups that have raised funding in the past year, including photo sharing app Dispo and social audio app Clubhouse. Dispo, similar to Poparazzi, encourages in-the-moment, untouched photo sharing, while Clubhouse has become popular for its candid audio conversations online.

Social media startups as a whole have raised nearly $1.8 billion in funding so far this year, and raised more than $4 billion last year, per Crunchbase data. 

Illustration: Dom Guzman