Unsplash Inc., the free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photo site operator, has raised $7.25 million led by Simple Token (OST) with participation of existing investor, Accomplice and Real Ventures, and new investors, Betaworks, Clark Valberg (Founder/CEO at InVision), Roger Dickey (Founder/CEO at Gigster), Rahul Vohra (Founder/CEO at Superhuman/ former Founder/CEO Rapportive, acq. by LinkedIn), and Mark Bonchek (Chief Epiphany Officer of Shift Thinking)
OST invested $5 million in the round in a combination of 80% $cash and 20% OST tokens. Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO of OST will be joining the board of directors of Unsplash.
Unsplash is in discussions with additional potential investors and the round could grow to as large as $10 million over the next months.
Unsplash splited from Crew Labs in November 2016. Crew Labs was acquired by Dribbble in April 2017. Crews Labs had previously raised US $8.5 million in Series A from Accomplice and Real Ventures.
[mepr-active rule=”374″ ifallowed=”hide”]##Subscribe today to see our research on this and all other subscriber ONLY items##[/mepr-active][mepr-active rule=”374″]Crew Labs has since changed name and continues to be parent company of Unsplash Inc. Mikael Cho, Accomplice Fund I, L.P. and Real Investment Fund, L.P. continue to be the top three shareholders of the parent company.[/mepr-active].
“The funds being invested today will be going toward defining a new economic model around photography. It won’t be a model where photos are going to be paid for with cryptocurrency. It will be a model that works equally well for both photographers and creators. We’ll also be working on some new products and tools that will make creation easier, faster, and fun,” said Mikael Cho, co-founder of Unsplash.
Unsplash and OST intend to tokenize and empower the Unsplash community with blockchain technology, while retaining the open, free-to-use principles that have led to Unsplash’s massive growth.
“Based on Unsplash’s 5 billion plus monthly photo viewing events, we believe this investment partnership marks the largest mass market consumer web-service Blockchain tokenization project ever announced,” said Goldberg.
Unsplash is the market leader in high quality, free to use, digital photography, and is the the fastest-growing photography platform since Instagram.
5.4 billion+ photos viewed per month
10 photos downloaded per second
48 billion+ photo views and 310M+ photo downloads since 2013
28 million+ photo downloads per month
5.6 billion+ API calls from developers integrating Unsplash into their apps
API per month: 442 million API calls per month
photo credit: Ben White, @benwhitephotography via unsplash