Journey planner startup TRAFI announced it had received USD500,000 in investment capital from Practica Capital. The Lithuanian startup would also be expecting former Nokia Maps chief Sylvain Grande to join its board of directors. TRAFI intends to do an aggressive expansion in key markets that had yet to be tapped by leading web mapping services like Google Maps.

Since its launch in Lithuania, TRAFI's customer base had reached over 300,000 monthly. The startup's platform provides unique mapping services to customers that provides a combination of public transportation, walking, bicycle and taxi routes.

TRAFI co-founder and chief Martynas Gudonavičius was confident about his startups success already dominated by popular service units of Google and Nokia.

In an interview, he said, "Expansion will be very aggressive in 2013/2014 and mainly focused on emerging markets around the world and multi-million population cities for example Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Moscow, etc. There is definitely a huge opportunity to grow in this market, it's actually under-invested, especially in emerging markets where open data is still very rare and Google/Apple are not really well established."