Bump Technologies makes an app that lets people bump their phones together to exchange things like business cards, photos and even money.
On Tuesday, Bump will announce that it has raised $16.5 million in venture capital. The firm Andreessen Horowitz is Bump’s newest investor, and its previous investors, including Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway, also contributed.
Bump started in 2008 as a way for people to exchange contact information without trading old-fashioned paper business cards. But in its newest incarnation, the start-up wants to become a mobile social network for exchanging photos and messages with family and friends.
Now, in addition to contact information, people with iPhones or Android phones can share photos, music, calendar appointments and location, and can also become friends on social networks and send messages to one another. Other apps also use the technology. PayPal, for instance, lets people exchange money by bumping their phones, and two apps trade sexual compatibility information.
The company is changing direction because people started using Bump more for social interactions than business ones, said two of its founders, David Lieb and Jake Mintz. For example, each day people now share about 40,000 contacts but almost a million photos.
“Bump just opens up a whole new landscape of social interactions and interpersonal functions and uses and photo-sharing and transactions, all based on physical proximity,” said Marc Andreessen, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who will join Bump’s board.
There are many other social networks that people already use on their phones to share photos, location and status updates, like Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.
Bump is different, the founders said, because it enables private exchanges between two people, unlike others that are for publishing messages or photos to wider groups or the public.
“It’s a proximity-based social network, for people and things you’re actually physically interacting with,” Mr. Lieb said.
Bump is one of a group of mobile apps that give people a way to use Internet-connected cellphones to bridge the virtual and physical worlds.
That could become a way to make money, the founders said. For example, people could someday bump their phones to get information or coupons from businesses or brands. “That could be valuable to merchants,” Mr. Mintz said.
Other apps, like Shopkick, offer similar ways for businesses to reach customers. Bump is not making money yet, beyond a bit from other companies that license its technology.
Bump works by gathering several signals from phones, including location and motion detection. Those signals are sent to Bump’s servers, where Bump figures out if another phone in the same place just experienced a bump, then matches the two phones. It all takes place immediately.
Andreessen Horowitz has been busy. On Monday, the firm also announced that it invested in Groupon’s $950 million round of fund-raising. The firm invests in very small Web companies and very big ones, and the Bump and Groupon investments exemplify both ends of the spectrum.