Scan.me has raised $1.7MM in funding from Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Startup Oracle Naval Ravikant. Their app launched in February 2011 and within 3-months they had 1MM downloads. Now roughly a year later and they have 10MM downloads they're getting more than 7MM scans per month. Take that.
I heard about Scan.me last summer after one of CEO Garrett Gee's many trips to Silicon Valley from Provo Utah where he was a college soccer player. After many unsuccessful attempts to raise with the Utah Venture Capital community he decided to pitch Valley on his company. In all he made 22-flights from Utah between June and July of last year. The company raised money shortly thereafter and has been cranking to improve and expand the product.
Two years ago Garrett didn't even own a smart phone. Once he saw a QR code he was amazed at how the technology worked. He was equally amazed at how poorly the products were designed that used the technology. In college he took CS, product design, and graphic design classes but has yet to graduate. He two cofounders Ben Turley (CTO, Ruby backend engineer) and Kirk Weimatt (COO, web frontend engineer) met up with Garrett at school.
Somehow Garrett's team secured the 'Scan' name in the iTunes app store. When they sat down to pick app names scan was #1. They were shocked when they typed it in and it was available. There were 200-300 bar scanning apps on the app store when they submitted. Some were even called things like 'Scan Pro' or 'Scan Crazy' but no one had thought to take scan. A golden name combined with a focus on product and design, they quickly became (and still are) the #1 search result in the app store when searching 'scan'.
I have to admit I have no great hope that QR codes are the future of marketing. Just tonight at #AfterHours someone demo'd their NFC application and I was throughly impressed by how simple and elegant the technology is. But Scan.me says they will become more than a QR scanner. They want people to be able to scan any and everything. They're adding functionality to check pricing and get marketing materials in a beautiful and elegant way.