Snapguide shares your knowledge with DIY guides, raises $5M

We all have knowledge to share, so why not create a guide with your smartphone? That’s the philosophy behind Snapguide, a do-it-yourself guide creator app for the iPhone. Heavy Bits, the company that created the app, has just raised a $5 million investment, chief executive Daniel Raffel told VentureBeat today.

Snapguide helps you photograph and write a how-to guide for anything. Unlike Instructables, Snapguide’s closest competitor, the guides are created completely on the iPhone.

Raffel’s exceptional attention to detail, picked up while he worked as a chef under Thomas Keller, makes Snapguide a home to high-quality, easy-to-understand guides. Snapguide also became one of the first iOS apps to integrate directly with Pinterest in April 2012.

“We have had a excellent relationship with our existing investors from our seed round and are honored to continue working with Atlas Venture, Crunchfund, and Index Ventures. In a few weeks we’ll be pushing a major update to our website that will make browsing and discovery a lot easier, I’m really proud of how it’s coming along. We’re currently in discussions with a number of major brands around partnership opportunities. In the coming months you can expect big updates to our mobile products,” Raffel told VentureBeat in an email.

The first institutional round of funding comes from Atlas Venture, Index Ventures, and Crunchfund, the same investors who participated in the company’s seed round.

Former Google employee Steve Krulewitz, along with Raffel, who hails from Yahoo, founded Heavy Bits in June 2011. Both worked for several months on what became Snapguide, which emerged from stealth in March. The company is based in San Francisco, Calif.