Many people are finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of all their contacts tied to various social media apps and services. Connect aims to eliminate that difficulty and make it easier than ever. And apparently some with big bucks believe it's a worthwhile venture as the startup has raised $10.3 million in funding.
Connect essentially pulls contacts from all of a user's social media networks, places them on a map and notifies the user when contacts are nearby.
"I'm 33 and like a lot of people my age or younger, I've lived in five cities already.... When I go home to see those friends, they've moved," said Connect co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Anima Sarah LaVoy.
Connect links with all major social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and LinkedIn, as well as user's email accounts, and the result is a "live" contact book.
"What we see is a lot of these applications are just trying to do one thing, splitting into various applications," said Ryan Allis, co-founder and CEO of Connect. "What we actually think what users want is one single place for interactions with friends."
To map a user's location, the app uses GPS, but users do not have to broadcast their location if they don't want to. Users who do want to broadcast their location simply need to check-in to where they are.
While the app is a great idea, even the creators acknowledge they still have work to do. For example, the service currently does not use location data from Twitter, which could certainly be a good addition for the more Twitter-heavy users among us.
"We're going to have another major announcement in about two months," said LaVoy. In fact, most of the $10.3 million is going toward further developing the product. It will also use a good portion to build up the engineering team and expand to more countries, despite the fact it's already currently located in 154.
Most of the funding came from Kinzon Capital, which accounts for $6.3 million of the money, as well as $1 million from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, and some funding from Bull City Venture Partners.
Currently, Connect is only available on iOS and web, but the company plans on launching an Android version in the first quarter of 2015.
The company was started in 2012 and is based in San Francisco. In total, with the new funding, the company has raised $15.9 million.
