Plazes, which is based in Zurich and Berlin, is announcing its first institutional round of financing this morning. They raised €2.7 million, or about $3.5 million, from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

We first profiled Plazes on June 11, 2005 (the day this blog started). It’s evolved significantly since then, obviously, but the core idea is the same – Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends.

I spoke with founder Felix Petersen earlier this evening. He says Plazes continues to see “strong growth” and has 40,000 active users currently. Those users are “predominantly users from the US (40%), followed by Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland.” A thousand or so users are online at any given time.