The Times reports that Whisper solicited investment from places like Time Inc. Earlier this year, Heyward said his company would begin focusing on marketing and advertising. It’s not clear what’s next for the start-up, which has struggled to turn a profit from its 30 million monthly users. (Whisper was not immediately available for comment.) It remains unclear whether its founders are using their own money to orchestrate some kind of buyout or if other investment firms are financing it. But according to three sources who spoke to the paper (on condition of anonymity, naturally), the company’s founders, Michael Heyward and Brad Brooks, may be orchestrating an attempt to buy out early investors to regain control of the company themselves. The investors and representatives for their firms all declined to comment to the Times. The Los Angeles Times reports that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew, Shasta’s Sean Flynn, and investor John Hadl all recently left their board-of-director positions with the start-up, which had raised $60 million in funding at a $200 million valuation at its peak in 2014. Los Angeles-based Whisper laid off 20 percent of its staff last month, and now it would appear its high-profile board members have left their positions, too. Now, one more competitor in the once-hot anonymous messaging space also seems to be fighting to stay above water. Earlier this year, gossip app Yik Yak, which was once valued at $400 million, sold its engineering team to Square for just $3 million. Secret, which had received $35 million in funding, shuttered in 2015. We’ve reached out to Whisper who wouldn’t comment on the rumors.The hype cycle for anonymous chat apps appears to be coming to an end. In the same way that Instagram was able to connect people through photos, Whisper has the opportunity to connect people through anonymity and shared experiences they wouldn’t normally share with the people they know in real life. And if Instagram has taught us anything, it’s that the power of a network built around tangible experiences can take on viral effects and one day be worth as much as $1 billion.
#Whisper app update series
The new funding comes just a few months after Whisper had raised a $3 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein participating. The Whisper investment is notable because it will be Botha’s first investment since the Instagram and Tumblr acquisitions, and we all know how those went (sidenote: Botha will be onstage at Disrupt SF next week). He also sits on the boards of EventBrite, Square, TokBox, and Jawbone. Botha, who is the former CFO of PayPal, has gone on to invest in a series of startups with huge, high-profile exits, including YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. With Botha on board, Whisper will get help from a VC who is well-known for identifying great opportunities in social networking and mobile. And more than 40 percent of users create content on the app, with the average daily user visiting Whisper for 30 minutes.
According to AllThingsD, Whisper is seeing 2.5 billion page views a month (which is more than all of CNN apparently). Apparently, it’s that combination of virality and monetization that has investors interested in the app. Whisper users can respond by creating and uploading their own secrets publicly, but the app also has a private messaging feature that users pay $5.99 a month for.
The app surfaces the most popular secrets that users shared based on responses and “hearts” received, and also allows users to see which secrets have been shared from other users nearby. Users either upload their own photos to Whisper or search via the app for those that exist on the Internet, and afterward can overlay text on top of them. But while most applications in the last generation of social apps had been based on user identity, Whisper differentiates itself by making communications anonymous - a rejection of pervasive identity on par with Snapchat’s disappearing messages. Like many social networks, the Whisper app has been exceedingly popular with young users - those in the 18-24-year-old bracket.
If Instagram is the highlight reel, then Whisper represents the behind-the-scenes of the human experience, eliciting confessional text like “I’m afraid my best friend is becoming my worst enemy” “I wish I knew why I want what I want” and images like the ones embedded in this post. But the app is decidedly mobile and provides features that allow users to respond to one another both publicly and privately. It’s reminiscent of the long-running website PostSecret, where users send anonymous secrets on postcards. Leveraging The Ephemeralnet, Whisper, which launched last November, provides an easy way for users to add text to images and share them anonymously.
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