Shutta lets you capture stunning photos by extracting them from videos

When Vietnam-based Shutta launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley in New York in May last year, the app, which lets people extract photos from videos, was well received by visitors and fellow developers, but garnered lukewarm attention from investors.

Since then and after seeing 100 percent growth in downloads in each month that passed, Shutta tells Tech in Asia it has raised US$260,000 in seed funding from a small consortium of European angel investors, whose identities it didn’t disclose.

“Shutta wants to change the way we take photos. We’ve all come across the problem of trying to shoot the perfect moment and missing it by a fraction of a second, perhaps due to the lag of the camera or simply because life moves by too fast,” says co-founder Barbara Ximenez. “That is the principal pain point that Shutta addresses.”

We’ve all come across the problem of trying to shoot the perfect moment and missing it by a fraction of a second.

In a nutshell, the app removes the need to decide between shooting video and taking photos. A 4K video taken on an iPhone 6s, for example, would give users photos of print-quality resolution.

Barbara’s co-founder James Shimell came up with the concept while at the now famous Festival of Colors in Tarifa, Spain – the wind and kite surf capital of Europe. He shot great videos of the event, but found that the majority of the photos he took were mostly just a fuzzy, albeit colorful, blur.

It seemed like a simple solution to use his video footage to extract the exact moment when hundreds of people threw their colored powder in the air. However, a quick search on the App Store didn’t give him results that would allow him to easily do so. It wasn’t straightforward even with a video editing software. So James decided he would build an app for this purpose himself.

Shutta isn’t just for pulling quality photos out of videos. It also includes a social network where the community of Shutta users from around the world can share their photos and interact with each other.

Highly engaged community

Like any other startup, the challenges were aplenty. The first and possibly biggest difficulty for Shutta was getting people in the habit of regularly taking videos.

“In part, we have been fortunate that, with the emergence of many other video apps, video has become much more prominent on social media. Building a social newsfeed into the app was our way of encouraging users to turn to the video camera more often. Being able to show first-time users the many day-to-day situations in which other users were able to get awesome photos has really helped convince users that video is a great basis for dynamic photography,” explains Barbara.

Image from Shutta website.

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