GoodOnes secures $3.5m to ‘free memories from camera rolls’

The start-up GoodOnes raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by TLV Partners with participation from Liquid2 Ventures (Joe Montana’s fund), as well as Rich Miner (former co-founder of Android), and Peter Welinder (founder of Carousel, sold to Dropbox), as well as many more seasoned operators and funders. 

GoodOnes develops a personal photo assistant powered by machine learning, affectionately named Ollie. It sifts out the bad photos and shows recommendations for the good ones. From there, it’s up ‌to the user to choose by swiping right and left.

The more you use the app, the better job it’ll do at curating, selecting, and weeding through photos. You may create a photobook, share with friends, or simply browse through the cute things your kids did last week (or last year!). All that – without the random screenshot, receipt or eight of the same photo getting in the way.

The company was founded by Israel Shalom, an 8200 alumni and a former product and engineering leader at Google and Dropbox and Aparna Pande, previously GM in Disney, Parents magazine and Mattel, who had recently sold her first start-up, Kidstir, a kids cooking platform. GoodOnes will use the investment to expand their research and developments efforts to develop their service.

Israel Shalom, GoodOnes’ CEO explains: “Like so many parents, having children turned my phone into a blackhole of thousands of photos. Capturing your children’s special and everyday moments should be a positive experience – but it can quickly become overwhelming and impossible to navigate.

“As a product and engineering leader from Google and Dropbox, I was surprised a solution hadn’t yet been developed. The industry to date has been focused on cloud storage, yet we knew there was a better way. We focused on building a fun and easy-to-use platform to help people go from cluttered camera roll to photo-zen.”

“When most people open their photo apps on Apple or Google, they experience anxiety rather than delight,” said investor Brian Sack of TLV Partners. “Instead of seeing the photos they care about, their gallery is scattered with rubbish. GoodOnes creates a clean photo experience, where every photo they look at has significance and meaning.”

Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android explains: “With the creation of mobile platforms, we ended up delivering powerful computers, digital cameras and streaming devices in everyone’s pocket– we could never have anticipated the volume of new content that would be created. GoodOnes brings powerful curation to the deluge of photos we’ve all come to accumulate. I’m very excited about this tool & tech, which is why I was thrilled to invest.”

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