• Mashable, Tuesday, October 18, 2011 12 AM

Social navigation application Waze has raised $30 million in a new financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “If you tote around an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, Waze offers an intelligent way to beat traffic,” Mashable explains. Waze debuted as a social traffic service in Israel in early 2009. Currently, the start-up has 1.3 million drivers in the country -- representing a large share of the country’s smartphone-ready citizens, according to Waze CEO Noam Bardin.

Worldwide, the service has north of 7.3 million registered users, while, Los Angeles presently accounts for the largest concentration of Waze users in a single metropolitan area. Now with 7 million drivers and a combined total of $67 million in funding, raised in three rounds, Waze is fast becoming a global phenomenon, Bardin tells Mashable. “It takes time for the service to mature,” he says. “Once you hit a certain amount of data, then you can provide the value,” he adds.

Yet, can Waze replace traffic reports, while challenging Google’s position as the king of online mapping? Eventually, Bardin says. “It will take a while to replace … but what we’re providing is much more granular,” he tells Mashable.

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