Everalbum, the San Francisco-based startup behind a fast-growing photo management app, has acquired Pout, a University of Waterloo Velocity startup.
The acquisition will see Pout's two co-founders, Laura Smith and Riley Donelson, join Everalbum's recently-established Waterloo Region operation, housed in Shopify's former office in Kitchener's Tannery complex.
“We are thrilled to welcome the Pout founders to the Everalbum family," said Andrew Dudum, founder of Everalbum, which now employs 26 people, including eight in Waterloo Region. Smith and Donelson "represent the incredible breadth of talent coming from Waterloo, supported by local incubators like Velocity and Communitech,” Dudum said.
Pout, which launched in 2014, is a mobile community where fashion-conscious users can interact around photos and videos that convey their personal style. The app has seen impressive user growth, and earned Smith and Donelson $25,000 at the Velocity Fund Finals a year ago.
Given Everalbum's ambition to build what Dudum called "the most seamless, mobile-first photo experience on iOS and Android," the design and engineering skills of Pout's co-founders will make them a good fit, he said.
"We’re excited about what’s possible as we build on the Pout team’s learnings and bring it together with work currently in progress by the Everalbum team," Dudum said. "Our goal is to deliver a seamless cross-platform experience that helps people be more productive in aggregating their photos from home and work life, changing the way we experience our memories."
For a company that just opened its Waterloo Region location - its first satellite office - in December, Everalbum hasn't wasted any time in scouting for local talent, the quality of which is what drew the company here to begin with. Several University of Waterloo students have done co-op stints at the company's main California location, and impressed Dudum in the process.
"I think what has been interesting to those we've talked to is the fact that this is an acquisition where the team does not come and join us at our headquarters in San Francisco," said Mario Sundar, Everalbum's California-based spokesman. "We're really proud to have a team in Waterloo that's growing in size; as a matter of fact, we're growing fast enough that sometimes we think that eventually it'll be the size of our team here in San Francisco."
"Time and time again, we've been super impressed [with Waterloo talent]," Sundar continued, "which is why the only space we have outside of the U.S. is in Waterloo."
Given that Everalbum is going head-to-head with established photo-storage giants such as Google Photos, Flickr and Dropbox, it has thus far been fairly quiet as it works to build a superior solution to its competitors' offerings.
Its efforts appear to be paying off, as it claims more than a million users and 2.5 billion photos backed up to its platform thus far.
Everalbum also has the support of some of Silicon Valley's top investors, as it is one of six portfolio companies listed on the site of Atomic Labs – a venture fund backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and others – which builds its own high-potential startups in-house.
