Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million

Following rumors from Silicon Alley Insider last week, Gowalla officially announced today a funding raise of $8.4 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures and others.

Gowalla is a location-based social networking application for smart phones. Similar to Foursquare, they let you share and discover new locations based on your social networks. Users earn stamps for their digital passports based on the places they’ve visited, which range from Seattle’s Space Needle to the Austin Java down the street.

The company has raised a total of $10 million since it was founded in 2007. Currently, the service is free and available on iPhone and Android-based smart phones.

Gowalla officially launched 10 weeks ago and according to the article in Austin American Statesman, “50,000 users have joined since” then and “users have created and checked in at 150,000 locations in over 8,500 cities in 100 countries.”

See our past coverage of Gowalla here.

Posted by Royal Frasier http://twitter.com/royalfrasier Royal Frasier writes the Informavore column for Austin Startup, covering everything from emerging data applications to charts that will have you drooling. She has a particular interest in spreading the value of better predictions and recognized relationships from mining, visualizing, and applying data for different situations and tasks. That or just spilling over the newest data porn. When not digging up information on the Web, Royal enjoys playing Frisbee at Zilker park, kayaking, perusing creative design magazines and sites, reading some elitist fictional novel, or just planning her next adventure. Royal is a PR hacker by day and works with a highly skilled team to bring early-stage technology companies to market To read more posts click here.