Trippy relaunched its product as a Q&A-based travel planning community that lets locals and experienced visitors discover and answer travelers' questions. The product surfaces conversational, specific queries, plots cited places on a map, and supports user photos from computers, social networks, or Creative Commons sources. New users are guided to name places they know so the site can route relevant questions to them. The company moved away from an earlier friends-only model after struggling to grow and ran a private beta for about 6–9 months before a soft launch in January; Trippy first debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. Distribution plans emphasize sharing via Facebook, Twitter, email and a longer-term focus on SEO. Founder J.R. Johnson declined to provide user figures, and no revenue metrics were disclosed. Financially, Trippy announced an additional $3.5 million in Series A funding that closed last year, led by eVentures with participation from True Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Trippy is a social travel site that gives people an easy way to help plan friends' trips. It debuted at Disrupt in San Francisco and was built by JR Johnson, who previously founded VirtualTourist, acquired by Expedia in 2008. The product restricts recommendations to people in a user's social graph to reduce spam and leverages Facebook's APIs to make it simple to suggest or echo hotels, bars, and restaurants. Its UI is designed to remove hurdles to emailing or sharing lists of recommended places with friends. Johnson began work on Trippy after his non-compete elapsed, and the company has announced outside funding of $1.75 million.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Apr 2014