Taiwan’s PicCollage gets 35 million downloads and USD 2.3M seed funding

Taiwanese startup Cardinal Blue is receiving strong interest from investors and consumers after joining the 500 Startups accelerator program.

Based in San Francisco and Taipei, the company announced today a number of milestones: Its photo collage app Pic Collage has attained 35 million downloads and 12 million monthly active users, and it has so far raised USD 2.3M in funding from investors including 500 Startups, Floodgate Fund, Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Sand Hill Angels, XG Ventures, Neil Young, and Bob Stevenson.

Cardinal Blue has also launched a branded content campaign with Interscope Records, which will enable users to download sticker packs featuring artists such as Robin Thicke, most well known for his song Blurred Lines.

The app, available on iOS and Android, lets people combine images, text and stickers into freeform collages which can be shared with friends. Its monetizes through in-app purchases of themed sticker packs.

It is seeing heavy usage amongst young women in the United States, which make up 45 percent of its userbase. Japan and United Kingdom are its next biggest markets. While the picture collage app space is saturated, PicCollage is banking on its social sharing features to rise above the din.

Cardinal Blue is founded by John Fan, Ching-Mei Chen, Jaime Chan, and Joanne Chang. It made an appearance at a competition at Echelon 2011, a startup conference in Singapore. They launched PicCollage following the event, which quickly ballooned to eight million downloads and 3.2 million monthly actives on iOS alone by July 2012.

PicCollage is not the startup’s first app. They had worked on photo filter app Snapbit and social apps Tribute Balloon and FriendStock before shifting their entire product development focus to PicCollage.