Messaging app Dasher gets $840K in funding from Greycroft, Accel Partners, and others

Messaging app Dasher has taken another round of funding bringing its total raised to roughly $2 million. Prominent venture capital firms Greycroft, Accel Partners, and Betaworks contributed to this latest round of $840,000.

Dasher is a chat app that’s all about features. The app has live location sharing, map sharing, GIFs, photos, the ability to poll your group of friends with yes-or-no questions, and the ability to delete messages after they’ve been sent. It also offers peer-to-peer payments through an integration with Venmo, a beta feature it launched months before Facebook Messenger announced payments.

The company won’t disclose how many users it has, but it notes that more than 70 percent of people who use the app once, “remain highly engaged” for at least a month afterwards. The problem for Dasher, is that there are a myriad of ways to communicate on mobile. Dasher is up against behemoths like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Line — truly the list goes on.

So why give money to yet another messenger app?

“While we think that Dasher could have broad social appeal, the hunch is that Dasher is going to be particularly popular, at the outset, in close-knit social settings such as campuses, colleges, dorms, and also workplaces and among work groups,” says Kamran Ansari, a former partner at Greycroft, who now heads up mergers and acquisitions at Pinterest.

He says you can never know which app will become massively popular, but Dasher has a much better user experience than anything he’s seen out there, especially for group texting.

Dasher’s main challenge will be getting the word out about its product, which is where this new funding comes in. The company will be using the cash to build out its marketing efforts, with a big push toward college campuses.