MobilyTrip, the mobile app and social network that lets travellers journal their trips, has raised a new round of financing: €300k from a group of angel investors, including Theo Hoffenberg, founder of the language and translation portal Reverso.net. It means that the six-person startup has now raised €500k in total.
The new funds will be used to further develop the product, including adding the option to print a hardbound book at the end of a trip, support for video, and the ability to edit the same journal on multiple devices and by multiple users. The company also wants to expand its partner program that lets travel sites add a user-generated content and social element to their offering.
A bigger marketing push is also planned as MobilyTrip aims to expand its community of 100,000 travellers, in which the majority hail from France, United States and Spain, although the service is said to be growing fast in other mainly European countries, such as Germany and Italy. Furthermore, those users have shared 500,000 ‘contextualized photos’ in more than 90 countries, which plays nicely with the startup’s broader mission to build a structured database of geotagged travel experiences that in turn can be used to power its social travel guide.
MobilyTrip’s mobile app lets travellers create travel journals on-the-go by recording their itinerary, and documenting the places they visit via photos, location and comments. It runs on iOS and Android, and is also designed to work offline so as to avoid roaming charges when abroad. It does this by letting users synchronize their travel journal with MobilyTrip’s website when they do have a mobile Internet connection so that they can share their travel experiences with friends, relatives, or their wider social graph i.e. Facebook and Twitter.
The startup is based in Paris and is founded by Benoît Le Ny, Alexandre Larribeau and Matthieu Godon.