Chicago-based Gtrot has raised $1M from Groupon investor Lightbank. The company is co-founded by Brittany Laughlin, who was a tech writer at Forbes and Zach Smith who was a consultant at Bain. They are currently working out of Lighbank’s offices.
Founded in 2009, Gtrot aims is a resource targeting students looking to plan, book and share travel. They want to take travel beyond the booking and make it more about the experience – where users have been, where they’re going, and who they want go with.
Gtrot took top prize out of 50 teams in the 2009 Harvard College i3 Innovation Challenge.
The functionality at present allows users to mail the itinerary and then Gtrot matches that to others who have similar plans. As such it reminds us of WAYN meets tripit. They also aggregate deals from sources like Groupon.
Gtrot needs to get a lot more students using the service – they say they currently have just 6K users. It can then make a living with hotel and airline bookings.