(WiGo Co-founders Giuliano Giacaglia and Ben Kaplan)
Boston's WiGo — the smartphone app helping college students answer "Who's going out tonight?" — announced Monday an undisclosed extension of its seed round, coming courtesy of Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, who will now serve as advisors to the startup.
With the extension, the seed round now totals $700,000, according to TechCrunch.
"Sean and Justin have built one of the most impactful companies in the last decade," said Ben Kaplan, WiGo's 22-year-old founder and CEO, in a statement. "I'm so excited to learn from their experiences at Tinder as we navigate WiGo's rapid growth and bring our vision to life."
WiGo is currently based out of Paul English's consumer technology startup hatchery, dubbed Blade. The KAYAK co-founder supplied seed funding to WiGo, alongside a slew of other high-profile investors, including: Vince Wilfork, defensive tackle for the New England Patriots; Ben Fischman, founder and former CEO of Rue La La; James van Riemsdyk, left winger for the Toronto Maple Leafs; and Kevin Colleran, one of the first 10 employees at Facebook.
Shared Colleran of WiGo's strength:
As one of the first employees at Facebook, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t when it comes to mass adoption of a social media platform among college students. College students are one of the hardest demographics for any platform to attract, and WiGo has clearly cracked the code at spreading throughout this valuable community.
Kaplan launched WiGo in January as an iOS app exclusive to Holy Cross, during his sophomore year. Within three weeks, half of the Worcester, Mass.-based school's iPhone carriers were using it, inspiring Kaplan to enter the app into the college's inaugural "Shark Tank" competition. He received the first-place prize of $100, along with the encouragement necessary to drop out of school and pursue the business opportunity in front of him — which he did alongside fellow co-founder Giuliano Giacaglia, who received his bachelor's and master's degree from MIT.
With WiGo, users can discover who is going out and where. If a user wants to see someone out that night, they can simply "Tap" him or her. The other party then receives a push notification, and can chat with the person who's tapped them within the app.
Kaplan has previously described the app's Tap as "a more modern way of flirting" — flirting which disappears daily at 5 a.m., when users' chats and record of where they went gets wiped clean. If a user tries to check his or her old messages, the app simply responds with the commentary, "Every day on WiGo is a new day."
The team is currently building out the app school by school. To ensure that students are the only ones using the tool, WiGo has integrated a blocking feature, aptly-dubbed "GTFO," which can be activated if just two users report someone who doesn't attend their school.
More than 25,000 events have been created on WiGo across 180 college campuses, according to the WiGo team. The latest round of financing will then be used to help fuel that growth.
Image via WiGo
