by MG Siegler
When Plancast
launched last November, it immediately put other sites like Upcoming, Dopplr, and every single e-vite service on notice. The “Foursquare for the future” has a simplicity that leads to a lot of social activity as we’ve seen over the past few months. And now that vision will get to flourish further with some seed funding.
The $800,000 seed round (which technically went to Plancast parent Worldly Developments) features an impressive investor list: SoftTechVC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. As well as individual angels, Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim, and Paige Craig. With the round, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier also accepts a seat on Plancast’s board.
The funding comes at a great time for Plancast as the service has just completed its first iPhone app (due to be submitted to the App Store shortly), and hopes to leverage the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin, Texas to get more users on board. A couple weeks ago, Plancast launched a special SXSW page to make it simple for festival-goers to see all the events going on and note which ones they plan to attend. (There is also an area for those not attending SXSW.)
Plancast remains a two-person team, founders Jay Marcyes and TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson. With the money, they plan to do some hiring including developers and designers. Up until now, Plancast has offloading some work to contractors including former Pownce co-founder Leah Culver to build their iPhone app.
Previously, Plancast raised a micro-seed from fbFund last summer. The service has an API in the works that should be entering private beta soon. And after the SXSW madness, the plan is to implement more privacy features, we’re told.
