Sequoia and Bain Capital-Backed Startup Was $350,000 Color.com Buyer

Startup with big funding bought Color.com for $350,000 in December.

In December I wrote about a GoDaddy-brokered sale of Color.com for $350,000.

We now know the buyer — a hot photo sharing startup with $41 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank before it even launched.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch describes it as a location-based twitter for photos. Here’s one scenario he describes:

Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies.

That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they’ll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity.

I like the choice of Color.com for this company. On the downside the word is spelled differently across the pond. [Update: they also acquired Colour.com, which means these guys are even smart than I thought. Sedo auctioned Colour.com last month. It didn’t hit the reserve but got up to $83,000. It looks like the got control of Colour.com around March 1.] But the upside is it’s a branded generic. The company will be able to earn trademark rights in the term given that it’s using it for distinct use (it’s not a site about colors).

Also, I just noticed that DotWeekly uncovered a while back that Color.com founder Bill Nguyen was the likely buyer. Now we know what he was up to.

This will be an interesting one to watch.