Heyday Raises $3.5 Million for Automated Journal App

The company behind Heyday, a personal journal iPhone app that came out last month, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by General Catalyst.

Heyday had a particularly well-received launch — note the out-of-character positive and constructive Hacker News thread. The app turns a users’ photos and locations into a sleek journal with montages and collections built around days and places.

The goal is to help people remember without doing any work. “The moment you think, ‘Is this something I want people to see?’ you start self-censoring, so you don’t have complete memory,” Heyday co-founder and CEO Siqi Chen told me at launch.

San Francisco-based Heyday worked for 18 months on the product before releasing it, and the Series A round was actually raised in March 2013, Chen said, so this is not a case of investors rushing in to validate early signs of success and get a piece of the action.

In less than a month, the app has received hundreds of thousands of downloads, Chen said.

General Catalyst partner Jonathan Teo led the Series A round, and though he has left an active investing capacity at that firm he will continue to advise Heyday and be on its board, Chen said.

The round also included Google Ventures and Spark Capital, who had previously participated in a $2 million seed round with other investors, including TriplePoint Capital, CrunchFund and SV Angel.

Coming next from Heyday, said Chen: Manually created moments (algorithms are good, but not always), syncing photos that are not stored locally and printing photo books. The company is also toying with a version of the app that would not require registration, so it would be even more private. But there are no plans yet to build for Android, Chen said.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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