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Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the growing list of celebrities who are also startup investors.
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Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the growing list of celebrities who are also startup investors. The first startup to benefit from both his following and pocketbook is visual social media platform Mobli, which announced Tuesday that DiCaprio was part of a $4 million seed round that it raised from “high profile investors.”
“Mobli allows people from all over the world to share moments,” says DiCaprio, who will take on an advisory position at Mobli.
Here’s how Mobli works: Users take photos and videos and the app automatically tags each image with a location (courtesy of Foursquare’s API) or major event in the vicinity. Users can also write tags like “sports” or “football” or “New York Giants.” This tagging system makes it possible to follow specific users, locations and topics. Images for any keyword or place can also be located through search.
Part of what separates Mobli from other visual social media platforms is the participation of “high-profile” folks like DiCaprio. Well-known users like Paris Hilton and David Arquette have helped user acquisition — and now that Mobli is being more specific about what kind of investors stand behind it, it’s easier to understand how the startup might have gained such influential users.
DiCaprio uses the platform, but sparingly. He’s posted seven times, but managed to collect more than 8,000 followers along the way. The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, an environmental organization, has posted 24 times.
With celebrities and social media platforms, however, a little seems to go a long way. For instance, Justin Bieber — who has been doing some startup shopping of his own — sent a single Instagram photo on Twitter and created a wave of traffic that resembled a pattern a site might experience if it were being hacked.
In DiCaprio’s case, his and his organization’s combined 31 Mobli posts have accounted for 163,244 “media views” on Mobli. There are non-celebrities using the platform — Mobli says that it is gaining 10,000 new users every day — and many of them have more media views than DiCaprio. Few, however, have earned them with so little effort.
Twitter itself benefited greatly from the influence of celebrity early adopters who it didn’t count among its investors.
When the next Twitter comes along, the celebrities whose influence help build it might very well have skin in the game.
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