Tripbod has secured a "sizeable" seed round (in the region of upper-six figures) in a bid to grow its existing product and support the launch of new services.
The investment comes from an undisclosed, Lond0n-based angel investor who found the local guide and trip planning service through the increasingly influential Angel List service.
The funding round comes just five months after TripBod relaunched as a destination experience marketplace, a system where locals create their own shop window on the site to offer tailor-made experiences froma destination.
Until now, TripBod had been mostly bootstrapped financially except for a small investment from executives who joined after the initial launch.
To coincide with the investment news, TripBod has this week launched an additional service on the site known as Make My Day.
The idea is to allow users to discover more about a location or its services by engaging with the TripBod database of locals through a dedicated platform.
Founder and CEO Sally Broom says:
"Rather than Tripbods listing what they offer and customers browsing/purchasing, travellers can post a request of what they want and how much they'll pay, then receive offers direct to their inbox."
Users can pay for the product online once they have decided which service to accept from the local on-the-ground.
Broom says in early testing the service has performed extremely well, appealing to what it is expected to be time-limited travellers keen to get advice quickly from a local.
Tripbod's move to a marketplace system from its original local-itinerary-for-sale service was first mooted at the Launch conference in San Francisco in March 2011.