Startup Profile: Traxo
June 17, 2009
We’ve known Andres and Andy with Traxo for quite a while. In fact they were the first company to cowork at the Big in Japan offices back in July. Since that time a lot of exciting stuff has happened with their team.
Traxo (www.traxo.com) is a travel service that allows users to automatically collect their travel itineraries from popular travel sites and share their upcoming and past travel plans with trusted friends. Traxo shows you where your friends have gone and which friend you should contact to ask for travel recommendations. Traxo also allows you to keep up with where your friends are going and alerts you when your travels are about to overlap with someone you know. The site is currently in private beta and will be launching publicly later this Summer.
Traxo was one of 50 companies selected for the fbFund. fbFund is a $10 million fund providing seed capital and mentorship to companies building applications that interact with the Facebook. The fund is backed by Accel Partners and Founders Fund and administered by Facebook.
They were over 400 applicants and Traxo was one of only three travel companies and the only company in DFW to be selected as a Finalist. Here’s a list of the other finalists.
Traxo focused on building a two-way Facebook integration that 1) allows users to bring their Facebook information and social graph to Traxo and 2) also allows members to share their travel plans within Facebook. Traxo knew Facebook would be a great fit when the team noticed that a tremendous amount of what their friends were sharing on Facebook was travel related.
Twenty out of the fifty companies selected will also be participating in their 2009 REV incubator program (similar to Y Combinator and Techstars). A total of $500K in seed funding was awarded to this class of winners in the form of convertible notes with a discount for future rounds (vs. last year where winners received non-recourse grants).
We’ve literally watched the Traxo team hard-at-work so we’re happy they’re being recognized by Facebook as a top social application. It’s basically like getting the ‘Good Housekeeping’ seal of approval for the social media space. And not surprisingly it has opened the door to a number of new partnership and investor discussions.
When I spoke with Andy this week he and Andres were traveling to Austin. He asked me to mention that if anyone is thinking about applying for the next round of the fbFund they would be more than happy to share any of their insight and experiences.
| Based: |
Dallas
|
|---|---|
| Founder: | Andres Fabris and Andy Chen |
| Title: |
Co-founder
|
| andy.chen@traxo.com |
|
| Twitter Profile: | http://twitter.com/traxo |
| Company: | Traxo |
| Web Site: | http://www.traxo.com |
