
Gowalla, a location-based social networking service, raises Series B funding round totaling $8.4 million. Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Greylock Partners led the round. The capital infusion will be used to strengthen growth efforts and further enhance Gowalla’s development capability. With this latest funding, Gowalla has now raised more than $10 million since it was founded in 2007.
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Co-Founder and Executive Chairman and Partner at Greylock, will join Gowalla as a board observer. New investors joining this round include: Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis and Chris Sacca. Existing investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund also participated in the round.

“We believe there is a bright future for location-based applications and we’re stoked to have Greylock Partners — with their experience working with large-scale networks like Digg, LinkedIn and Facebook — join us in building our innovative service,” said Josh Williams, co-founder and CEO of Gowalla.
In the ten weeks since Gowalla officially launched, 50,000 users have joined the service. In that short period its community has created and checked in at 150,000 locations in over 8,500 cities representing 100 countries around the world. Gowalla is now seeing more than 20,000 check-ins daily and its users are adding new locations at a rate of 3,500 or more each day.

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