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Lapse, the app turning your phone into an old-school camera, snaps up $30M

It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it, and take pictures that then need to be developed.

For those who long for those old days, a startup called Lapse has been giving smartphone users an alternative — you take pictures that you have to wait to see “developed” before sharing them with a select group of friends if you choose. For Lapse, the lesson was definitely learned, although in its defense, Silvertown still maintains that the startup had to start somewhere: since the premise is to have a way to share your pictures with a small group of friends with no discovery feed, if you download the app and have no contacts using it, where do you go from there? “What’s so interesting is that most high scale platforms, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, a lot of these originally started out life as places where we would keep up to date with our friends, and then slowly they kind of became the other stuff we know them for today,” such as sites for news, or entertainment or to keep up with influencers, Jacob Andreou, a general partner at Greylock, said in an interview.

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