Aura, a high-design smart frame startup established by early Twitter employees, has raised $26 million in a mix of debt and equity led by LAGO Innovation Fund. This funding followed the massive increase of users to two million in September 2022 from one million in December 2021, with nearly 1 million digital frames sold.
The startup, which makes not only frames but also a photo-sharing app, is planning to use the fund to give the last boost to this quarter and make further investments in 2023.
Led by its founders, CEO Abdur Chowdhury and CTO Eric Jensen, the startup has been showing massive growth for at least the last three years at 100 percent year on year.
The duo originally named the company Pushd following their departure from Twitter in 2011. The initial idea was to work with the concept of push notifications to make people feel connected with each other. The founders also played around with the trend of digital frames, which, unfortunately, back in the day, relied heavily on thumb drives.
First launched in 2016 after a company rebranding, Aura’s smart frames typically depict a small group of around four people. Each person can add pictures to the frames. On average, Aura’s devices collectively show roughly 1 billion photos to people daily.
To enhance the experience, Aura has also built privacy-focused meta-data-based facial recognition and computer vision algorithms that create intelligent picture clusters.
Living on in an evergreen way in the frame that could bring joy
Abdur Chowdhury, CEO
“We realized we could build a nice, private network for photos captured in the app, but living on in an evergreen way in the frame that could bring joy,” Chowdhury, a former chief science officer at Twitter, said. “Beyond your close friends and family, it’s all about the continuation of telling a story, capturing those pictures and seeing them in your home.”
Aura had previously raised around $13 million in equity from various investors. Some notable ones include Spark Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks, DCVC and Levy Family Office.
