Chute, a Y Combinator backed company that helps apps and sites capture, manage and display media files, just closed a $2.7 million round of funding led by Freestyle Capital with the participation of  Battery Ventures, USVP and Salesforce.com, as well as individual investors Joe Fernandez, Binh Tran and Joshua Reeves.

“The best brands and publishers in the industry are bringing user generated media alive and displaying it on their site, on their Facebook pages, in their mobile apps, or at live events; anywhere their content lives,” said Ranvir Gujral, Co-Founder of Chute. “Chute lets them do this. With Chute, publishers, brands, and application developers no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to build functionality to capture user generated media like photos. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, believe it will be an exciting ride and feel great about the investors we have alongside us.”

The funds raised will be used to hire and invest in sales and marketing as they continue to provide an easy way for content producers and app developers to add photo functionality to their apps or sites by simply embedding a few lines of code since everything they need is in the cloud.  Chute provides “cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations and user authentication.”

Chute opens up a whole new way for companies to cash-in as it makes things easier for them and of course faster.  App and site developers no longer need to build their own tools in order to put media on their apps or sites, all they need to do is use Chute’s available tools, APIs,and SDKs to give their babies a little more structure and content.

“As a founder of two successful digital media companies, I got the explosive potential of Chute in the first meeting,” said Josh Felser, Freestyle Capital Co-Founder. “There is no better way for publishers and brands to add images and related virality to their online experiences and the Chute team knows this space intimately.”

Chute’s clientele ranges from publishers like NBCNews.com and Lucky Magazine, big brands like Taylormade and Havaianas, and live entertainment companies like House of Blues Entertainment and L.A. Live.

Social media is also seeing the benefits of using Chute.  Mikey Kilun, Senior Manager, Social Media for House of Blues Entertainment, stated that Chute lets them utilize hashtag driven content feeds across several key House of Blues Entertainment social media and web assets.  Hashtag contents are viral, just look at Twitter, it’s great at driving brand awareness and fan engagement, in simple words, hashtags make topics seem like hot gossip that spreads like wildfire.  Also, hashtagged topics have a tendency to stay relevant or in Twitter lingo, trending.  So if sites get to utilize hashtag driven content, then they’d be able to keep up with what’s hot and what’s not, and base their marketing strategy on that.