Honeycomb, a women-led firm, is creating a private social media networking platform for families, backed by $4 million in venture funding from Stellation Capital’s Peter Boyce.
The software, which is no longer in private beta, allows families to select and share their favorite moments and memories via their smartphone as an alternative to using a more public social media site, such as Facebook, or group texting, where photographs and videos can easily get lost.
Honeycomb is also the first business backed by Boyce’s new firm, Stellation Capital, which he launched this year after leaving General Catalyst.
Angel investors include Ancestry CEO Deborah Liu, Giphy creator Alex Chung, and Twitter VP of Engineering Nick Caldwell, formerly of Reddit, as well as DCM (Kyle Lui), Bling Capital (Ben Ling), and Precursor Ventures (Charles Hudson).
Honeycomb was founded by Amelia Lin, a former Udacity and Optimizely executive, and Nicole Wee, a former Instagram product manager. The co-founders were motivated to create an app that would bring families together through private social networking platform, but they started with a separate product called Saga.
Their first app was a social audio experience that allowed families to capture and record their life stories — such as how the grandparents met, or even just birthday wishes for a child — which could then be listened to afterwards as a sort of audio diary.
However, while that app gained a lot of early attention, it wasn’t exactly what families were looking for. Instead, early adopters kept telling the team that they wanted to keep their photographs and videos as well as their audio recordings. So, this past fall, the team launched its app as Honeycomb.
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