Zenly builds a location-sharing app that goes beyond simple check-ins by showing friends’ real-time locations and social activity. Teens have adopted the app, which has reached about 2 million downloads. The company plans to add layers of data such as notifications when friends are hanging out and signals for trending places. Zenly has about 35 employees and plans to open a San Francisco office while keeping most engineering in France and operating with two offices. Financially, Zenly raised $22.5 million over the summer and had previously raised an $11.2 million Series A last year, and still had plenty of cash before this new round. The startup faces competition from major map players like Google, Apple and Uber and will likely need to build its own mapping data as it expands beyond pins on a map. Zenly is a map-based real-time location-sharing app that displays your location and your friends' locations and lets you tap a friend to see their exact address. It uses an efficient, accurate location algorithm designed to preserve battery life by requesting location primarily when friends open the app, and it also shows friends' battery levels. Features include sending a temporary browser link to share location for a few hours, emojis to ping friends, a "meet" button that starts an itinerary in Maps, Citymapper or Uber, and a compass-like function for nearby friends. The app had been available on the App Store and Play Store for about a year and four months and had grown virally among teenagers, spreading through high schools and middle schools. As of the report, Zenly was approaching 1 million registered users with roughly 340,000 monthly active users and about 80,000 daily active users. The company plans to add social layers to increase stickiness and is focused on growing its user base to make the product more compelling as more friends join.

Total raised

$34M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Sep 2016