Dopplr: New Funding Round for Business Travel Network
Today, Dopplr, the social network for business travelers, announced that it has secured a second round of financing. The lead investor for this round is Ester Dyson. Other investors include Tom Glocer from Reuters, Joshua Schachter from delicious, and magazine publisher Tyler Brule. Dopplr received its first seed investment from Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman, and Joichi Ito in September 2007. Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr's user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.
Since then, Dopplr has seen some nice growth, but according to Compete and Google, this growth stalled during the summer.
Dopplr mostly courts frequent fliers and business travelers. Currently, it mostly functions as a way for this group to keep track of travel plans and arrange impromptu meetings. Overall, Dopplr's functionality is quite spartan, but thanks to its budding recommendation and review system, the site is slowly adding more proprietary content.
Dopplr was also one of the earliest backers of Yahoo's Fire Eagle location sharing platform, though the site doesn't seem to make heavy use of these features so far. The most interesting development for Dopplr in the last few months was the addtion of groups, which is a very useful feature for companies that have a lot of employees who travel frequently.
At the same time, though, other travel sites and social networks like PlanetEye, TripIt, or TravelMuse could easily replicate Dopplr's feature set while building on their already extensive backlog of original content.