Vebbler Raises $500K and Launches Social Camera App

Vebbler has launched a new photo app for groups, and aims to become the largest consumer-internet app coming out of India. It has also raised an angel round of USD 500,000 from a syndicate of 16 investors from different countries including India, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US, using the Let’s Venture platform. The lead investors include Anupam Mittal Founder & CEO of People Group, Sharad Sharma Co-Founder of iSpirt, Venkat Raju CEO of Kyron Accelerator, Pranav Pai & Siddarth Pai Founding Partners of 3one4 Capital and others.

Vebbler is a camera-first app designed to make sharing of photos easy between groups at night outs, vacations and celebrations. While people love taking photos together, the process of later sending them to each other is extremely cumbersome, and Vebbler promises to make that happen in one single-tap. With Vebbler, sending and receiving photos will become a breeze and no one will require begging and bugging friends to send photos via instant messaging apps, USB drives or cloud folders anymore. What’s more - one can express themselves on each photo through stunning filters, quick captions and candid reactions.

It has launched cross-platform app on Android and iOS (http://vblr.co). Vebbler has already garnered 50,000+ early sign-ups before the launch, with hundreds of colleges and students eagerly awaiting its launch.



The idea struck Sahil Bhagat, CEO and Founder, Vebbler when he was in college. He adds, “Vebbler was always built as a platform for people to share moments with private groups, or as we call it - Clubs. More recently, we shifted our focus to mobile. As an account of personal experience, during college, frequent night outs and spontaneous trips were very common, and we’d take hundreds of photos from our phones, only to undergo the mechanical and pain-staking process of sending our moments with each other afterward. As a result, we’d be left with an incomplete picture of the story most of the times. It is then that I realized that there had to be a better way for people to stitch together photos and videos of everyday moments of their lives.”

One of Vebbler’s lead investors, Anupam Mittal, Founder & CEO, People Group said, “The investment in Vebbler is a part of, perhaps, the most ambitious initiative by an Indian start-up to build a global consumer Tech Company. They are addressing a unique unarticulated need faced by most digital natives in the world and I am happy to partner them in this exciting journey.”

Vebbler’s Major USPS:

Camera-First: Instantly share photos with one or multiple clubs directly from the camera.

One-Time or On-Going: Perfect for one-time events like road trips and music concerts, or recurring moments like those your college friends and family.

Real-Time: A live timeline for each club that stitches together all photos taken through your friends’ phones as soon as they are captured.

Private: Vebbler is private, enabling you to share moments that you’d probably not share on other public platforms, allowing you to always be yourself - candid and real.

Community Focused: Vebbler isn’t a photo management app that organizes your photos based on location or facial recognition. They are a camera app that’s social by design, allowing people to instantly share photos with each other in real-time.

Another lead investor Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder iSprit said, “I think photos and videos are an increasingly powerful medium for communication that surpasses the limitations of language and geography, especially in a country like India. Vebbler has built a great platform to connect groups and provide them a powerful tool to share and express themselves in new ways and that is very exciting to me.”

“As early-stage investors, we enjoy working with founders of product companies because they prove, by personal example that the intersection of passion, capability, perseverance, and lateral thinking leads to impressive results. This is a young team that will try everything possible to work with their core users to arrive at the best solution, and that is a fantastic process to be a part of.” added Pranav Pai Founding Partner 3one4 Capital.

CEO of Kyron Accelerator Venkat Raju said, “Collaboration and "group app" has produced great winners (Whatsapp, Slack etc.) and still a very large, untapped market. Here comes Vebbler, a visual sharing app. Finally, a consumer internet product company out of India set to conquer the global market.”

You can simply download the Vebbler app, create a club with your gang, shoot photos and let Vebbler handle the rest! As club/group members begin capturing and sharing photos, a real-time feed gets instantaneously created, syncing the experiences from everyone’s camera. Vebbler stitches together the photos from different phones into one single timeline.

Vebbler was founded in June 2013 by Sahil Bhagat and is based in Bangalore. Vebbler is a new social camera for groups. Vebbler is building out the product in a way that makes it the default camera on the smartphone.

Vebbler is Promising New Personal Social Network of Indian Origin

India is the number 2 market for Facebook after the US. A and thus a successful homegrown network could create stiff competition, that is why a Mumbai based web startup - Vebbler is a new promising personal + social network launched in beta that claims to have more meaningful conversations with different relationships in their lives without one aspect of their life spilling into another.

Today you will find that each and every member of society is having online social presence via different social networks such facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. our parents, teachers, colleagues everyone is on social media. There is a need for a more evolved way of connecting which can help people easily segregate every relationship into different layers and give them a personal space to share with each of them and Vebbler claims to address this.

The UI and look-n-feel of Vebbler resemble of  Google plus layout however the former is more intuitive and engaging and this is what a social network should have for its user base. Vebbler provides a 'layered' two-way relationship model as part of the 'core user experience' called as Crowd Layering Model and Vebbler is first social web startups in India designed on Crowd Layering Model (CLM).

There is also a growing echo among avid social media users that networks have become very impersonal, cluttered and privacy dead. As a product Vebbler offers an intimate, personal, clutter-free and privacy-aware platform to connect with the people who really matter. The portal has also launched a mobile-friendly version of Vebbler.

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Vebbler launched into beta on July 23^rd_, 2013. Here’s a sneak peek into what makes Vebbler different from other products in the market:

1. Social + Personal: In a big, open world of the Internet, here is a platform for you to connect with your true friends most valued relationships. If other networks are newspapers, Vebbler is more like a personal diary, a place where you can be yourself and express yourself freely.


2. Relationships beyond Friends: Today, our parents, teachers, colleagues and even bosses are present on social media. There is a need for an evolved method of connecting, which can easily help a user to layer their friends and other relationships, such as workmates and family.


3. Design by Discipline: A great product is not about what you make, it’s about how you present it’. With Clean typefaces, flat icons, simple two column layout and responsive photo galleries, Vebbler puts design at the heart of its user experience.

At launch, Vebbler will introduce with the following features:

 

• Clubs(for personal sharing): Clubs are a core element of Vebbler’s user experience. Today, two way relationships need to be layered in a seamless and user-friendly way. Clubs allows a user to add a person into different layers, such as friends, family, workmates and acquaintances. This enables a user to have an entirely separate space for sharing with each relationship.


• Followers (for public sharing): While keeping the closest 500 people in your Clubs, you can follow as many people you find interesting. This makes Vebbler a great platform for public conversations too, while keeping your private life intact.


• Bigger, Better Photos: Profile photos are big again and photographs are stored in high quality, making Vebbler a delightful platform for photographers and photography enthusiasts.


• ~Wavetags: Move over Hashtags. Now, start a ~Wave! Build conversations in real time, follow waves that interest you and see its popularity with the Wave-O-Meter.


• Search: Social search is beyond searching things by name. Searching interests, photos, waves and conversations around a particular topic creates a more intuitive search experience.

Vebbler is now have users from 51 countries and 370 cities and soon introduce new features such as - location-based sharing, automated and custom Clubs along with more features for photos.