A start-up company developing a web-based service for guitar enthusiasts has completed a €110,000 angel funding round and hopes to return back to the funding market later on this year as it prepares for a formal launch.

Co-founder Keith Bohanna told The Sunday Business Post that, while the company had planned on raising €140,000 initially, its requirement had changed after it was decided to bring forward the second funding round.

The company decided to accelerate its route to market in order to stave off the threat of competition once it went public with its product. Consequently, it will attempt to raise around €500,000 during the second and third quarter of this year.

Bohanna said that the first round of funding came from a number of private investors and a grant. He hoped that some investors would follow their money in the second round, but also said that there was potential for a number of others to come on board. Some investors may have found the initial round unattractive, because the amount being sought was too small.

‘‘In December we achieved High Potential Start-Up status with Enterprise Ireland, we are in discussions with their Silicon Valley office and we would hope that they would participate in the next round,” he said. On the face it, db Twang is a social networking tool for guitar enthusiasts. However, Bohanna said that the core of the site was what he hoped would become the world’s largest digital database of guitars.

‘‘That helps you find more out about the guitar you own and contact people with similar guitars, but you are also establishing a provenance. So if you have a guitar that is worth any kind of money at all, the more information you record, the more it could be worth when you come to sell it,” he said.

With funding now in the bag, db Twang is expecting to launch a closed beta testing phase in March.

The company has already signed up 400 interested users.

‘‘We are very aware of how much feedback we could get and we will need the resources to intelligently respond to that. If you have an open service that proves very popular, you start to get overwhelmed by feedback,” said Bohanna, explaining the decision to go for a closed beta.

‘‘It is going to take three to six months. The operational decision we will have to make is whether we launch the service fully before the next round of funding is in place. The key thing is, though, to put real users in there and prove to investors that there is demand and interest.”