Leonardo DiCaprio Invests in Social Start-Up Mobli

By Dave Smith | October 25 2011 4:10 PM

Social media start-up Mobli raised a $4 million seed round from high profile investors, including the king of the world himself, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

Leonardo DiCaprio, star of such films as "Inception," "Blood Diamond" and "The Aviator," chose Mobli to be his first tech start-up investment.

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The 36-year-old actor, who has starred in both films and TV shows from an early age, will also become an advisor to the company.

Mobli allows people from all over the world to share moments, DiCaprio said.

Mobli, which launched in May in New York City, is a mobile platform where users can take photos or videos and tag them with categories like, sports, football, or New York Jets, and the app automatically broadcasts the uploads in a certain area. It also shows the user other events being broadcast in their vicinity. Therefore, if you're at a baseball game but have awful seats behind a pillar, you can boot up Mobli and get better vantage points of the game from other nearby app users.

DiCaprio is a user of Mobli, but despite posting only seven times, he's still managed to rack up more than 8,000 followers. His environmental organization, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, has posted 24 times on the platform, accounting for 163,244 total media views on Mobli.

Mobli is gaining 10,000 new users daily, which has certainly been helped by celebrities like DiCaprio adopting the platform early. Other social start-ups have leveraged this strategy, including social video start-up Tout, which drew more than 500,000 viewers to its site when Shaquille O'Neal decided to announce his retirement from the NBA on the six-week old platform. Twitter also got a boost very early on from celebrities like comedian Stephen Fry and writer Neil Gaiman.

Celebrities in the film, television and music industries have been investing more and more into technology start-ups. One of the most active investors in Silicon Valley is Two and a Half Men star Ashton Kutcher, who has invested in and supported start-ups like Ooma, Airbnb, Zite and Foursquare. Recently, rapper MC Hammer got into the tech game, announcing his very own search engine called WireDoo.

While DiCaprio may be new to the tech investing scene, he has long been a donor to environmental efforts, contributing $1 million to Haiti after its devastating earthquake and another $1 million to the Wildlife Conservation Society in November 2010.

DiCaprio will next appear as the title character in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, a biopic about the first director of the FBI, which will be released in theatres on Nov. 9.