Honeycomb Social App
A women-led startup called Honeycomb is launching its private social app for families, backed by $4 million in seed funding led by Peter Boyce at Stellation Capital. Now out of private beta, the app offers families a way to curate and share their favorite moments and memories via their smartphone as an alternative to using a more public social media platform, like Facebook, or group texting, where photos and videos can be easily lost.
Of note, Honeycomb is the first startup Boyce is backing with his new firm, Stellation Capital, founded this year after he left General Catalyst. Other participants in the round include DCM (Kyle Lui), Bling Capital (Ben Ling) and Precursor Ventures (Charles Hudson), as well as angels including Ancestry CEO Deborah Liu, Giphy founder Alex Chung and Twitter VP of Engineering Nick Caldwell, formerly of Reddit.
Honeycomb itself was co-founded by CEO Amelia Lin, previously of Udacity and Optimizely, and former Instagram product manager Nicole Wee. The co-founders had been inspired to create an app that would connect families through private social networking but had originally approached this with a different product, called Saga. Their first app was a social audio experience that let families capture and records their life stories — like tales about how the grandparents first met, for example, or even just birthday wishes for a child that can be listened to later, as a sort of audio diary.
But while that app received plenty of early press, it wasn’t necessarily what families wanted. Instead, the team kept hearing from early adopters how they wanted to store their photos and videos, too, not just audio recordings. So the team pivoted and rebranded their app as Honeycomb this past fall.
The new experience launched into private beta testing in September, offering a way for families to save their favorite photos and videos, which are combined with text and turned into a digital story of sorts. The experience as it stands today isn’t necessarily that much more robust compared with a group chat over iMessage, for instance, but it does offer an easy way to go back to revisit older shares which can be difficult to do when using text messaging. It also lets users set a reminder so they’ll remember to curate their favorite memories from the day — a feature that’s probably best for new parents who rapidly fill their phones with dozens of new photos daily as their baby hits new milestones.
We help it become a really easy daily ritual of sorting through the best memories of the day … You pick your favorites and they automatically get compiled into this story that’s not only shared with your family, but also saved in this collection forever
CEO Amelia Lin
Honeycomb is also different from mainstream social apps because it will be a subscription-based service, not one that’s monetized through advertising. For now, however, the app is free as the startup gets the new app off the ground.
Honeycomb Social App
