Tiny Pictures Raises $7.2M for Mobile Media

Tiny Pictures, a mobile media company whose product is called Radar, has raised $7.2 million in Series B funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and including Mohr Davidow Ventures. The three-year-old company is focused on the consumer market, with a free service that enables users to share photos and videos from their phones to small groups of friends.

Tiny Pictures has 750,000 users around the world, with the U.S., UK, India, and South Africa being its biggest markets. The San Francisco-based company’s main effort is universal accessibility. Radar works as a WAP site and users can submit via multimedia messages. “We’re not building this as a product for 4G devices,” said Tiny Pictures founder and CEO John Poisson. “We’re building a product for legacy devices already in the market.”

Though none are very popular, there are quite a variety of approaches in the mobile video space. Versus its competitors, Tiny Pictures goes to consumers instead of selling to carriers to white-labeling for media. And of course it is focused on user production — like Zannel, Treemo, and others — rather than consumption.

“There’s nothing about a white-label deal that’s interesting to us,” said Poisson in a recent interview. “We’re building a lifestyle brand, not like Shozu, which acts like a utility for you to move your stuff from one place to another.”

Though its customers use its service for private, personal media sharing, Tiny Pictures is seeking to make money by attracting sponsored public channels from celebrities and promotions. This product is very early on — Radar has only done 10 deals so far, with pricing on a case-by-case basis. will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas has one of these channels and is advising the company on them.

Tiny Pictures, which has 14 employees, has now raised $11.2 million in total.