Kyle
Inbed.me is a new website that connects young travelers who stay in hostels together socially. It’s the brain child of Diego Saez-Gil who spent a good portion of his life backpacking across the world and staying in hostels along the way. His backpacking experience brought about his first business, the backpacking community, Off Track Planet, the ultimate backpacker’s online guide to travel. He quickly grew that site to 120,000 users from around the world.
Inbed.me is the first socially injected website for booking hostels, beds and couches and is targeted at the student traveler market. The company is headquartered in New York, and Bogota, Colombia. They currently have 1200 hostels on inbed.me however TechCrunch reports that they are about to start a partnership with Hostelworld, which is the market leader for booking hostels online. Hostelworld books beds in over 25,000 hostels worldwide. According to the site that’s only half of the hostels available.
More after the break
The company just announced the completion of a seed round of $1.2 million dollars. The investor list includes; Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures along with founders Fabrice Grinda and Dave Lerner.
Saez-Gil came up with the idea behind inbed.me with a group of friends that all met at a hostel in Brooklyn NY. They were looking for a way to share the better hostels that were more social and more fun with a wide audience. They also wanted a way that people staying in hostels could meet others in advance and plan trips for when they arrive or plan on all getting to the destination together.
Inbed.me is still in it’s early stages. They launched the site in 2011 at Startup Weekend New York. They also took part in Startup Chile and NXTP labs in Argentina.
Inbed.me is looking to expand it’s offering of worldwide hostels. They are also hoping to expand to more social networks and create a mobile app for both iOS and Android.
source: TechHustlers, TechCrunch
