San Francisco based social networking site Piczo will announce a third round of financing later today - $11 million, led by new investors U.S. Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners (an early Skype investor). Existing investors Sierra Ventures and Catamount also participated. Piczo previously raised $7 million over two rounds.
Piczo is one of the larger social networks, with 10 million unique visitors generating 2 billion or so page views per month. Their niche is younger teens - 75% of Piczo’s members are between 13-16 years old. And Piczo focuses on security and privacy. Site visitors cannot search or browse user profiles (they must know the exact URL of the member profile), and and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members. The company’s largest single market is the UK, which accounts for 40% of their users and 50% of page views.
We compared Piczo to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Tagged, Friendster and others back in September. See here for other Piczo coverage.
Comments
Some people might say that young users seeking security are the most viable of any niche social networking market but I think they are just an indication that future generations will be interested in social networking in general and will look to specific sites to fill their most pressing needs. Congrats to Piczo.
For crying out loud, how many rounds are these guys going to need for a profitability event? Bubble much?
Congratulations, Piczo!
Kudos for the great work in enforcing security & privacy.
I fail to understand why a social networking site, assuming they have as many employees as Legacy.com (45) and MySpace (60) who do nothing but review content, needs $18 million dollars (especially when websites are not as expensive to build any more). Are they having lavish parties that we’re not invited to? Unless they’re blowing it mostly on advertising….which is ironic if their business model is based on advertising.
Amy, I’m having trouble with the idea too. I have trouble with a lot of the funding amounts I see here, even in a climate where some seemingly unintelligent acquisitions are made, the investment amounts don’t seem to be at all in proportion to either what I’d estimate costs to be at or what I’d expect a liquidity event to be worth. This is very likely due to ignorance on my part, if so could someone please enlighten me?
Oh good, just what the world needs. Another social networking site.
Someone needs to start a company that lets people network all the social networks they belong to.
Seems to me that Pizco is one of those horses now, where they have to win the race or they lose everything. Hopefully they will figure out how to sell the site off to Google, who are flush with overpriced stock, or MySpace before market realities kick in. Next we will hear that Club Penguin is getting millions. At least Club Pengin sounds better and easier to remember. If I were investing millions I would expect more than a 5 digit name thrown on the wall.
geez that’s a lot of money. i hope they can make it last!
Piczo is a great site, concept and has a solid user base. It will only grow once its kid friendly features catch on more outside the UK. It will be interesting to see exactly how they spend that 11mm, yes it will be for expansion but how will they stand out?
Honestly, if you can’t profit with 2 BILLION page views per month, I don’t know who would hand you another 18 million, but I guess it’s pretty high stakes poker out there. I think the idea is that these sites need ot make a major push, become a major player, or quit.
I would think more of them would just grab hold of profitability and do more of what they’re doing than to sell more and more of the company off. I guess that’s why I’m neither granting nor securing my 4th round of VC funding.
Piczo was actually a decent business when it was run by several guys here in SF in the bootstrap mode. I happen to know that they had very decent traffic when they operated on budgets like 100-200k/yr.
They decided to make it big however. Now their traffic is flat, and the company is controlled by greedy VC. I think it’s a failure.
This is the most impossible site to view. It takes the cake in fugly. I dare anyone to stay on this site for more than 30 minutes. Your head will explode. Complete and utter chaos. maybe that’s why the kids like it?
sounds like they are being rewarded for building a strong presence in a very attractive niche - valuations and funding needs are all relative to the marketing value of their audience. nicely done!
With that type of usage, I’d agree it’s not a good sign if they’re not close to profitability and need this much money. Hopefully the investors see something that’s not apparent to the rest of us. Otherwise it seems like another one of those “if we just give them more money we’ll accelerate the path to profitability” investments that usually just accelerates the spending. It reminds me of the hypothetical situation where an investor asks “We’re losing money on every product we sell. What can we do?” And the executive answers “It’s easy. We’ll make it up on volume!”
haha Drama 2.0 that quote is so dead on
Dick your last sentence was correct.
Congratulations to Jeremy and Piczo…. and I’m sorry for all those messages on your cell phone.
“Site visitors cannot search or browse user profiles (they must know the exact URL of the member profile)”
Absolutely false. On the very front page are a bunch of profiles to browse! And no login required!
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