Exit Summary
In November of 2015 Fly Labs (TechCrunch) was acquired by Google to join them and expand the Google Photos team. Google Photos is a home for your life’s memories, powered by Google’s machine learning and computer vision technology. It’s a perfect match for what they had built at Fly Labs, and successfully folded in their products (including Clips, Fly, Tempo and Crop on the Fly) to Google Photos already impressive suite of services.
Overview
When 645 invested, Fly Labs was a fast-growing provider of mobile video editing software. Fly’s products enabled users to create, edit and share high-quality videos using their mobile devices. The founder envisioned a future where mobile video creation and editing is ubiquitous. Fly was able to build a complete suite of mobile video editing applications to serve the needs of consumers.
Investment Rationale
Back in 2014 when we invested, video consumption on mobile devices was still in its infancy but growing at a rapid rate. At the time, mobile video consumption was projected to grow 10x between 2014 and 2020. It was our belief that video content creators had increasingly been designing and producing content specifically for mobile platforms to meet user demand. At the time, there was no complete suite of tools to allow amateur video content producers to create, edit and share high-quality video on mobile devices. Fly Labs filled this market void and their first product, released in mid-2014, generated over 1 million downloads in the first 6 months, was rated best new video app in 125 countries, and resulted in Fly being recognized by Apple as a top creator of mobile editing software.