Y Combinator startup Chute lands $2.7M, connects dots between developers and media

Chute, a startup that helps developers quickly and easily bring multimedia content into their apps, has just sealed a $2.7 million funding deal with a few of the usual suspects in Silicon Valley early-stage investment.

Josh Felser’s firm, Freestyle Capital, led the round, which saw participation from Battery Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and a handful of corporations and individuals, including Salesforce.com, Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez, and a few others. It was all very chummy, and then everyone had cake.*

*Probably not that last part.

What Chute does is quite interesting. The startup, which got its sea legs at Y Combinator, makes it simple for developers to get images into their apps with “a cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations, and user authentication,” all with a few lines of code.

As Chute co-founder Ranvir Gujral explained in a statement, “The best brands and publishers in the industry are bringing user-generated media alive and displaying it on their site, on their Facebook pages, in their mobile apps, or at live events — anywhere their content lives. Chute lets them do this. With Chute, publishers, brands, and application developers no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to build functionality to capture user-generated media like photos.”

So far, the young company’s client base includes a wide range of big-name brands, from NBCNews.com and Lucky Magazine to Havaianas (yes, the flip flop company) and House of Blues.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, believe it will be an exciting ride ,and feel great about the investors we have alongside us,” Gujral said.

Felser added, “As a founder of two successful digital media companies [that’d be Crackle, which sold to Sony for $65 million, and Spinner, which went to Aol in 1999 for $320 million], I got the explosive potential of Chute in the first meeting. … The Chute team knows this space intimately.”

Chute was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco. If you’re looking for a job, knock on their door, because they said the new funds will be used for hiring, too.