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Actress Soleil MoonFrye and internet executive Kara Nortman sealed $1.1 million additional funding to continue to “inspire creativity among families.” This expands on an initial $2.5 million raised in seed funding from Upfront Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Daher Capital and Google Ventures in April.
Right now, the company is looking to connect digital and physical experiences through their photo application that allows parents to create collage-like experiences with their kids by using patent-pending technology to separate human-like elements of photos. The company just launched the app in Android last week, shortly after their August iOS launch.
The app features a “cut-out technology” that helps families play with the photos like a scrapbook, then find do-it-yourself suggestions to employ at home. The app is also a mobile commerce platform with the opportunity to subscribe to new activities to increase family engagement.
This is a shift away from the previous family pastimes, which relied on computer games and video games to soak up children’s attention. Frye told PandoDaily that the photo editing function is a smaller part of bigger dreams for “momtrepreneurs.”
Frye, who is expecting her third child in early 2014, said she looks to enhance parent-child interaction because she has learned as much from her children as they do from her; so the Moonfrye app looks to make this parent-child communication easier.
Frye is also known outside of Moonfrye as the star of eighties sitcom “Punky Brewster” and Nortman, Moonfrye’s CEO, has experience in tech working as a senior vice president at Urbanspoon and Citysearch.
The Los Angeles-based team currently stands at thirteen people, with a number of contributors. They are actively expanding content, and the company reports a lot of the appeal of the app is the website and activity suggestions for parents.
