Tripit to focus on partnerships and product

Tripit will focus on further partnerships and product development after it secured $7 million in funding last week.

earlier this month Tripit announced it had raised $7 million from Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, adding to the $6.1 million it had previously raised.

Co-founder and vice president of business development Scott Hintz said investors were excited about the company’s growth but declined to comment on any exit plans.

“It’s nice to be able to raise a third round in this environment. It’s bigger than we have done before and a vote of confidence from our investors. Azure has a lot of experience in software as a service and we want to accelerate our development.”

Hintz said a number of enhancements were already planned for Tripit Groups and hinted that the sharing of transfers and restaurant reviews could be introduced in the future.

The service enables travellers within a company to see where others are travelling to as well as view who lives in a destination.

“Tripit Groups will be the foundation for a lot of additional services. We can start to provide services such as ride sharing and services geared towards management in terms of insight into where travellers are going, their spending and there are opportunities for trip approval. There are all sorts of questions we can start to answer.”

Hintz said Tripit was not setting itself up in competition with existing travel management companies but looking to partner with them. The company already has an agreement in place with BCD Travel, which will go live in the next few days.

The company has already given 1,000 of its top companies access to the groups facility and has received many more requests since being part of the Google Apps Marketplace launch earlier this week. The Marketplace gives Tripit access to a potential two million businesses with 20 million users.

Tripit was the only travel application launched as part of the marketplace and is already the third most installed service.

Tripit also plans to target the small and medium sized business market and is to experiment with online advertising to increase its presence.

Further partnerships such as its tie-up with Hotwire, which went live two weeks ago, are also in the pipeline.