Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Chute Gets $2.7M for User-Generated Media Developer Tools

Chute, which helps publishers and developers coordinate user-generated photo and video uploads, has raised $2.7 million from investors including Freestyle Capital, USVP, Battery Ventures, Salesforce and Klout CEO Joe Fernandez.

The company offers infrastructure services for media uploads — so Web sites and mobile apps use Chute’s APIs, SDKs and prebuilt tools to add components rather than building their own versions of standard features like admin panels or “Likes” and comments.

This is similar to how apps might use Twilio to add SMS or SendGrid to send out email notifications.

Often developers just incorporate Chute using the tools it posts on its site, but more recently the company has been “moving up the food chain,” as co-founder Ranvir Gujral put it, to help brands and publishers more directly.

So, for instance, MSNBC used Chute to power a page of user photos of the recent annular eclipse, both via direct upload and by aggregating the tag #eclipse2012 on Twitter and Instagram (pictured here). And the new TNT show “Dallas” has a Chute meme-generator tool — think lolcats, with big, all-caps text layered on a photo — on its Tumblr account.

Other examples are on Chute’s Pinterest account.

Chute has 13 employees and is based in San Francisco.

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