- Social screen sharing and group video chat app Squad announced it raised $5 million in seed funding
Squad — a social screen sharing and group video chat app — announced it raised $5 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital. First Round Capital’s general partner Hayley Bay Barna oversaw the funding round. Betaworks, Y Combinator, Alpha Bridge Ventures, Day One Ventures, Jane VC, Gina Bianchini, and Sebastian Gil also participated in the round.
With this round of funding, Squad — which is led by CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin — plans to use this round of funding to expand its operations.
The Squad app works as a social screen sharing and group video chat service where users can hang out with friends in their favorite apps such as YouTube, travel apps like Airbnb, browse Tinder, and other shopping apps. Squad now has 450,000 registered users, of which 70% are teenage girls. And this year, users have clocked around 1 million hours inside Squad calls.
“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” said Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford in an interview with TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudi Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”
The Squad platform ensures that users could easily block and report inappropriate users. And the app especially prioritizes the security of its primarily female audience so girls can continue coming back to the app without concerns.
Squad originally started out as a data-sharing tool called Molly, which had previously raised $1.5 million BBG, Betaworks, CrunchFund, and Halogen Ventures. In its current form, the new Squad service launched in January. It was Crawford’s 14-year-old daughter who inspired the idea behind Squad by asking her mother to create an app that allowed her to share mobile experiences with her friends.
