There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that. So it should be no surprise that they’ve attracted some big time investors.
SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. This round, led by First Round Capital, also includes from Redpoint Ventures, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, David Cohen, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and Freestyle Capital. Yes, it’s basically a who’s who in angel investing that is on board now with SimpleGeo.
The two founders, Matt Galligan and Joe Stump, who are both based in Boulder, CO, used their time in San Francisco this month to close this new round. And the company is moving fast. Just a few weeks ago, the company raised a debt round to cover expenses as the company switched gears away from a previous focus on augmented reality gaming (which Galligan wrote about for us here). This new funding is being tacked on to that for its proper seed round.
SimpleGeo is not the only company working to provide an easy way for others to tap into the location craze. Another company on our geostream panel at the CrunchUp, GeoAPI, is doing something in a similar vein, but with a different approach.
SimpleGeo remains in beta for the time being.
Participants in its previous debt round include Joanna Shields (formerly Bebo), David Liu (formerly AOL), Ziv Navoth (formerly Bebo), Darius Contractor (Bebo), Ravi Narasimhan (Strategic Data Corp/NewsCorp), and Jason Knapp (Strategic Data Corp/NewsCorp). Needless to say, a lot of powerful people clearly want this company to succeed.
I think location based services are becoming a craze as of late.. It remains to be seen whether it’s a bubble or not..
Congrats to the team and to the investors! Exciting space and needed infrastructure.
Congrats guys…
Congrats guys…Matt is a rockstar and they will be very successful.
Congratulations to SimpleGeo. The 1.5 million should help them kick the geoloco can further down the street. Their intrastructure should be helpful to a wide variety of developers/startups.
Any update on Facebook’s GeoLoco plans? It was raised during the panel discussion and there were some rumors last week. Any chance they’d acquire one of these startups rather than develop themselves?
Also, any update on Yahoo’s fire eagle? I thought they had an interesting approach to handling geolocation info but haven’t heard much in a while.
big name bandwagon vc’s investing pennies. in general if a startup was so great it would not have 12-20 seed round investors for a miniscule 1.5 mil.
personally very excited about the startup offering. internet needs a ning of “simple geo” plug in services. this is something our site has been waiting for. very excited and cant wait to see the product and business model.
wish simplegeo the best of skill.
I understand your perspective, but at the same time, we took on those investors for a very specific reason. They’re fantastic. Everyone of them. Even if they’re investing pennies, they’re involved, and that’s what matters more. We could have easily gone after two big investors and called it a day, but we were very strategic in who we wanted to get involved.
We also definitely share your opinion that this kind of solution is needed, hence why we’re building it
Thanks for the support…
Hello Matt.
My name is Felipe Pires. And i’m the founder of a very promising internet startup here in Miami. I applied to get the beta version of your services , but they haven’t been sent to me yet. I’m rolling out an amazing product, seriously good. Plis contact me, you’ll not regret it.
Warm regards.
Felipe Pires
President, Demorld Co.
Does this have a future? It doesn’t seem that hard to include geo data in apps/sites, people seem to do it all the time.
Isn’t this just another gold rush with questionable monetary returns? Surprising so many folks would gamble when predicting success in this kind of effort is among the most difficult.
Looks probable that a name or 2 got involved and the others jumped on the bandwagon.
Good thing it isn’t a lot of money. More palatable to write off when it’s time…
Our company, IP2Location.com, has been providing IP geolocation solution to developers since 2001.
We will be glad if we could help SimpleGeo or other companies to roll out their geolocation solutions in timely and cost effective manner.
Matt, whatever happend to SocialThing? http://blog.socialthing.com/
It was acquired by AOL about a year ago.
Matt -
Great news sir! A solid slate of investors and a sure sign of future success…
Look forward to hearing more…keep up the great work guys.
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