$100 Million Valuation For Geni

Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures (see our coverage of CRV here), with a post-money valuation of $100 million. George Zachary from CRV is joining the Geni board of directors. This was originally passed to us as a rumor, and Geni founder and CEO David Sacks has confirmed the story.

This is a 10x increase in valuation for Geni. The company’s first round of financing, led by Founders Fund, was $1.5 million, at a $10 million post-money valuation.

Sacks describes Geni as a “social network for the family.” It provides an easy to use (and easy on the eyes) Flash based family tree. As you add family members, they are optionally emailed to register as well and help fill out the tree. When I first used the service, I added my mother and father. Seven weeks later I have 126 family members in my tree, all added by relatives.

Despite early hiccups due to above-expectations usage, Geni is killing it. Sacks says they have over 100,000 registered users who’ve added nearly 2 million “nodes” (family members) to their family trees.

Sacks has big plans to build out Geni functionality in the future. Look for localization into other languages (60% of Geni users are outside the U.S., even though the site is only in English), messaging to family members, photo and video storage and sharing, etc. Sacks also says they have plans to integrate the Google Maps API to allow users to see the physical location of other family members.

The company is based in Los Angeles and has eighteen employees.