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A friend from college who returned to Germany after graduation happened to be in town last week, something I learned from catching, by chance, his announcement on Facebook that he’d be coming around.
But what if I hadn’t seen that post? With all the social media we have to keep track of dispersed among several networks, missing things like that is more than a possibility, and it’s something mobile app Connect wants to remedy. The company is also announcing today that it has raised $10.3 million in new funding.
Connect’s app lets you plug in your social networks and phone book and pulls your friends and contacts’ locations onto a map. It also pings you when a friend is nearby (you can set the radius you’d like), and lets you communicate with them right from the app through whichever social channel you want.
“I’m 33 and like a lot of people my age or younger, I’ve lived in five cities already… When I go home to see those friends, they’ve moved,” said Connect cofounder and chief innovation officer Anima Sarah LaVoy in an interview with VentureBeat.
Currently, Connect users can hook up their Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, phone book, Gmail, and LinkedIn accounts, from which the app builds their social circle’s map.
To map your location, Connect uses your own phone’s GPS to know where you are, but without broadcasting it and only if you volunteer a check-in, cofounder and chief executive Ryan Allis told VentureBeat. It uses the location data from Facebook, Instagram, the Connect app itself, and Foursquare to let you know where your friends are.
While it’s a pretty nifty idea, it still has some work to do, something LaVoy admitted herself.
For example, it’s currently not using location data from Twitter, which could improve its performance for users whose social circles are heavy Twitter users (such as, say, tech reporters).
And that’s probably why the team is currently hard at work on some new features.
“We’re going to have another major announcement in about two months,” LaVoy said. In fact, Connect is spending much of its new funding on building the product, Allis said.
It also plans on using the new funding to grow its engineering team, expand internationally (it’s currently in 154 countries), and to finally launch on Android in the first quarter of 2015 as it’s currently only available on iOS and web.
Most of the new funding comes from Kinzon Capital ($6.3 million), along with $1 million from Marc Benioff, additional funding from Bull City Venture Partners, and a convertible note from this past June.
Connect was founded in 2012 by Allis, LaVoy, Lilia Tamm, and Zachary Melamed and is based in San Francisco. The new funding brings the company’s total to $15.9 million.
