PBwiki closed $2 million in funding this morning from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Founder and CEO David Weekly confirmed that previous investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh also put in an additional $100k.
PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed. It recently added a What You See is What You Get editor, which if satisfactory to new users, could help PBwiki overcome one of the primary barriers to wiki adoption. The recent upgrade also added the ability to include YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, stock charts and chat functionality to your wikis. Chat will likely be useful but I question how many of their users will be excited about the rest of the new features. PBWiki’s basic features are what make it shine.
Weekly told me that there are more than 200,000 PBwikis and a substantial portion of them have been active in the past 60 days. (My ten sleeping PBwikis notwithstanding, apparently.) Weekly says the ads on free accounts make less than 5% of the company’s revenue; premium accounts are available for between $10 and $35 per month. He says the 8 person company brings in enough money to be “profitable some months.”
Weekly says that he expects to make an announcement about interoperability with other wiki providers in the next few weeks. I like PBwiki but will be curious to see what they have up their sleeve that would give confidence to institutional investors. Mohr Davidow Ventures doesn’t typically invest in consumer facing, web 2.0 type companies.
The enterprise wiki landscape is widely seen as a mess, bereft of reliable, usable and lightweight solutions – perhaps we’ll see someone scoop up this solid service soon. Please hold the jokes about a possible Yahoo! acquisition.
Competitors include Wikispaces, Wikia and others.