Led by LAGO Innovation Fund, a leading provider of growth capital to the innovation economy, the debt-equity raise comes ahead of what’s expected to be Aura’s biggest holiday season yet, driven by the early success of its new £149 connected frame, Carver. 

Since launching in 2016, Aura’s business has consistently doubled year-over-year, in large part due to an impressive base of recurring hardware revenue driven by a growing network of passionate customers.  Customers invite their loved ones to share photos in the Aura app, and those loved ones go on to gift and buy their own frames. After hitting one million app users in December 2021, Aura has doubled its app user base in just nine months and is expected to hit three million in early January 2023.

"There is no shortage of ways to share photos. The problem is that once shared, they remain on our devices, in group texts and social feeds," said Abdur Chowdhury, Co-Founder and CEO of Aura. "We created Aura to put those memories on display, both in the app and on premium frames in homes around the world. We're actively building new products and services to make it increasingly easy and elegant for our customers to share, collect, and display memories with their loved ones using Aura."

“LAGO was attracted to the vision Aura has for a decentralised, ad-free social network purpose-built for celebrating life’s cherished moments with loved ones in its purest form. Backed by strong technology, a phenomenal user experience and a world-class management team, Aura has quickly positioned itself as the leader in private network photo sharing.  LAGO is excited to provide Aura with both debt and equity capital in support of its growth objectives,” said Tim Gottfried, co-founder and Managing Partner of LAGO Innovation Fund. 

Aura revolutionised the digital frame by making it social. Aura frames enable private in-app photo sharing across families in more than 100 countries and display more than one billion photos per day in total. 

The company’s line-up of WiFi-connected frames is designed in-house with individually calibrated displays tuned for photos, optimising for colour, brightness, and viewing angle. Frames come with AI-powered smart features to simplify photo viewing including auto-cropping, slideshow curation, and sensors that automatically adjust brightness and turn the frame off at night. The company regularly releases new app and frame features, most recently introducing an iOS photo widget, AI-powered photo colouriser, and in-app photo scanner to frame old, printed photos or kids’ art.

Aura frames are currently available on auraframes.co.uk and Amazon, and through partner retailers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.