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February 5, 2007

European Startup Plazes Raises €2.7 million

Michael Arrington

21 comments »

Plazes, which is based in Zurich and Berlin, is announcing its first institutional round of financing this morning. They raised €2.7 million, or about $3.5 million, from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

We first profiled Plazes on June 11, 2005 (the day this blog started). It’s evolved significantly since then, obviously, but the core idea is the same - Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends.

I spoke with founder Felix Petersen earlier this evening. He says Plazes continues to see “strong growth” and has 40,000 active users currently. Those users are “predominantly users from the US (40%), followed by Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland.” A thousand or so users are online at any given time.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 1:36 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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    February 5th, 2007 at 6:29 pm

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Comments

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  1. Oobie Doobie Kanoobie

    February 5th, 2007 at 2:15 am

    2.7M Euro. wow well done!

    “Several ten thousand active users” doesn’t sound like an awful lot of users to be making a decent turnover

  2. Pranav

    February 5th, 2007 at 3:01 am

    “Several ten thousand active users” doesn’t sound like an awful lot of users to be making a decent turnover - That’s I think because they’re new? give them time! it seems to be a strong concept that has proved itself to be venture funding worthy.

  3. Klaas Brumann

    February 5th, 2007 at 3:27 am

    Can’t see how this technology would work on its own. It needs to be integrated with the likes of Xing, LinkedIn, http://www.acadenici.net or even better Bebo, Friendster, Miaplaza… Then the feature would expand to a relevant number of users.

  4. chrisco

    February 5th, 2007 at 4:02 am

    RE Klaas Brumann’s comment: It will be integrated… same/similar functionality will be on a lot of other websites by the end of the year.

    -Chris Comella, Founder
    BuzzPal - The World Is Your Party
    http://www.buzzpal.com

  5. eoecho | Greg Magnus

    February 5th, 2007 at 4:16 am

    Agree - don’t see this standing alone, needs another hook.

  6. Mr 2.0

    February 5th, 2007 at 4:44 am

    Well done, Plazes!

  7. Chris

    February 5th, 2007 at 4:55 am

    Well, it seems that the site is down… Error 500, Internal Server Error.

    Maybe the Techcrunch effect.

  8. dogStar

    February 5th, 2007 at 5:23 am

    “Venture funding worthy” does not make it a good idea. I know of several VC-funded start-ups that have been better funded than Plazes but have gone tits-up after a couple of years.

    It’s all about confidence. As soon as the VC senses a loss of confidence from *any* quarter they pull their investment.

    Given that my efforts to view plazes.com have just been met with a blank screen suggests they already have some serious scalability issues.

  9. Steff

    February 5th, 2007 at 5:34 am

    The site is back online now.

  10. Anne

    February 5th, 2007 at 5:44 am

    Great, that’s like loopt, that Sequoia capital has been financing. However loopt only works with Boost mobile, whereas plazes works with all the mobile network operators.

    @dogStar
    Sorry, but you might habe problems with your internet connection, plazes is much more than a blank page…
    Try it harder: http://www.plazes.com ;-)

  11. tom

    February 5th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    well, by searching for ALL People (WHERE: united states) - it brings up 74 user… so i’m wondering where this 16′000 are.

    anyway - good luck to them - they’ll need it :)

  12. Shambhu

    February 5th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    Isn’t this what Dodgeball does/did?

  13. foo

    February 5th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    It probably has giant potential. I’ve tried it a bit and the localization with the mobile is just awesome. Especially if you have a couple friends near by, or if you are looking for wifi or just any other thing since the search they got now is tag based which opens up the possibilities to a lot more…

  14. heisenberg

    February 5th, 2007 at 9:39 am

    what is the sensitivity of this, or any mobile phone-based GPS? can it tell you what building you are near, what block you are in, what city you are in? how much can this actually pinpoint your location?

  15. Nicole

    February 5th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    Well, my most liked feature is exploring new places (and beating other users in it) and of course monitoring my travel speed on my profile page! Which especially wenn I plaze myself at the airport in Europe and then quickly in west coast is at least a wopping 880 km/h per day. ;))

    SMS trailing works well enough for me, but as usual, there needs to be more data. I am probably more of not so intensiv user, but my next phone shall have an operating system the plazer can understand. :)

  16. startupman

    February 5th, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    How a Google mashup can ever receive 2.7 million is beyond my comprehension… I want to see how they will manage to survive once they start to make money and Google will come collect some mapping license fees.

    Excuse me please? What is their revenue model? Or you think 40k users will grow into millions in one year? This site is for geeks, why do normal people need it?

    Am surprised the VC didn’t have any better deals to invest in at the time. If I were an LP, I’d be worried about my money right now.

  17. Miky

    February 6th, 2007 at 3:08 am

    hmmm, kind of like couchsurfing withouth the couch. not impressed.

  18. spumoni

    February 6th, 2007 at 6:38 am

    Never understood this type of investment. Why would a site like that need $3.5 million to develop? And if bought for that, how could it ever make back $3.5 million in profit for investors?

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