Trover Raises $2.5M to Expand Location-based Photo-Sharing Service

Share this:

troverTrover, a travel startup based around location-tagged photos, has announced a new $2.5 million in series A funding. The company says the money will go towards expanding its community, improve the company’s social connections, and refine the website’s content publishing tools.

Trover has also launched a redesign of its iPhone app, which the company says aims for more streamlined navigation that will help connect users to each other. The app first launched in 2011 as a photo-sharing service, and has slowly narrow its focus on the travel vertical.

The round of funding is led by Concur, whose co-founder, Michael Hilton, will also be joining the Trover board of directors. Other angel investors, who have previously invested in Trover, include General Catalyst Partners, Benchmark Capital, and Trover and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton.

This is the second major round of investment for Trover since it launched. Jason Karas, the company’s CEO, left the Seattle-based startup TravelPost to begin working on Trover an independent start-up in March 2011, taking a portion of $9.8 million in series A funding to invest in it.

With Gowalla gone, and Foursquare struggling to find its feet as a business, the outlook for proximity-based social services looks dimmer today than it did when the company launched two years ago. But travel has always been a strong a vertical for local plays, and the funding may hint at a second, much smaller, wind for the space.

Max Antonucci is an intern at Street Fight.

Tags: