GraffitiGeo
Graffiti Geo - Scribbles of words.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | N/A | Seed | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
GraffitiGeo Inc. was a mobile application company founded in 2009 by Nikhil Pandit, Jared Tame, and Siong Ong. The company was a participant in the Summer 2009 batch of the Y Combinator accelerator program, securing $20,000 in seed funding. Positioned as a local search and discovery tool, GraffitiGeo allowed users to leave short comments and vote on places they visited, functioning as a condensed version of Yelp. The platform was designed as a free iPhone application that transformed the physical world into a virtual graffiti wall where users could post messages of up to 100 characters for others to discover and interact with.
The core of the GraffitiGeo experience was a gamified system designed to encourage user engagement. Users earned "street cred" for activities such as posting messages or receiving positive votes on their comments. Accumulating enough points allowed users to form "mobs" with friends, pool their points, and claim virtual territories corresponding to actual city blocks. This introduced a team-based competitive element to the location-based service. The app also included features like a heatmap to visualize popular spots in a given area. In addition to its primary commenting function, the company was also developing an augmented reality feature that would overlay user votes and comments onto a phone's camera view of the real world.
GraffitiGeo's business model was centered on user-generated content and network effects, with the app's success being heavily dependent on achieving a critical mass of users in any given location. The company operated in the competitive local discovery market alongside larger players. In October 2009, just a few months after its inception, GraffitiGeo was acquired by Loopt, another Y Combinator-backed company specializing in location-based services. This event was categorized as an "acqui-hire," indicating that the primary value for the acquirer was the talent and expertise of the founding team.
Keywords: local search, discovery app, mobile commenting, location-based service, gamification, augmented reality, Y Combinator, Loopt, Nikhil Pandit, Jared Tame, Siong Ong, virtual graffiti, place voting, user-generated reviews, mobile application, startup acquisition, acqui-hire, location-based gaming, social mapping, community reviews