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.
This post hurts my brain.
Another million dollar story? Come on, you crazy venture capitalist can you at least invest flying car or something neat. There’s tons of copycat web 2.0
Definition of post-money valuation (per inversterworld.com)
A company’s valuation just after its latest round of funding, equal to the number of shares outstanding times the share price from the latest financing.
I think this proves again that there are opportunities for good execution on old ideas. They are certainly not the first to go after the huge interest in genealogy. With a focus on UI and understanding of the patterns that have emerged in the social networking space, they have quickly build something of significant value. It’s a good time to be an an entrepreneur.
the co. is building value at a rate of 10x the input of capital, it’s 100K members have added ‘new members’ at a rate of 20x
ok, the site concept is growing.
this site basically links and interlinks relatives – in a referral-like fashion.
not an amazing feat, if you ask me.
but the model draws people since it’s organic
then what – that’s that? i see a diagram list of who’s my daddy’s daddy’s daddy…
what’s the revenue model.. build a massive bank of blood relatives then throw ads all over those eyeballs?
wow – at 100mil valuation they are gonna need a super strong exit to make it worthwhile for the current(and future) vcs.
-Zaid
They will make money by taxing the data.
At a certain point they’re going to cut the free access to the database. Want to find out your family tree? Pay $10 bucks for the work done by others. Want to print out your family tree? Pay $15 bucks.
“…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”.
Then what? Will you be visiting the site every day? once a month? once a year?
Investors are dumb to think that every “social” site has potential of mySpace. Family discussions are where you want utmost privacy.This is exact opposite of myspace scene.
I used to praise Geni in the beginning (and hey, we all know I usually hate mediocre web 2.0 crap).
But since then I realized that Geni has one flaw it won’t admit – people don’t come back. I have a tree with 60 people, of whom 25 registered and logged-in one or twice in the first few days.. and since then – nada.
Geni sucks big time
I also realized that I couldn’t care less about connecting with family members.. There’s a reason we don’t keep in touch – WE DON’T WANT TO. It’s not like we didn’t have a way to get their emails or whatever in the past.. we just don’t need it. So what if they’re family? LOL. Geni seemed smart in the beginning, but as time goes by I think it’ll prove to be a useless social network.. because it connects a bunch of people who for so many years did not care or bother to be, well, connected!
So, if I got my math right, Charles River Ventures got only 10% stake of the company?! That’s crazy.. what kind of exit are they looking at? 500 million?
What about the site getting hacked (like MySpace had some issues)? Where’s the data gonna go? Google Maps with it…. Let’s see if we can target someones whole offspring / heritage. If we don’t like them let’s extort them or even kill the whole tree. Maybe not now, not tomorrow, but gathering such data has led the Germans to target whole bunch of families to transport them to camps……
Maybe I’m paranoid, but you just can’t play with these type of databases. We can’t trust anyone with this kind of power. I know exactly who’s valuating such company with these amounts of money……
- Unomi -
I spoke with David Sacks back in January. The interview can be found at:
http://www.npos...?intID=INT00185
I too loved Geni on day 0. By day 15 I had 400 nodes (not a joke) and I had logged in, probably, 40 times. Between days 15 and 60, I logged in twice.
Check out the 3 month view:
http://www.alex...ic.com/geni.com
Can you say “bubble”?
Congratulations to all involved. This is an example of great execution of a good idea. I believe Multiply was the leader in this “get your family and relatives on board” social networking scene and Geni is set to take the mantle from them.
Way to go!
calm down everyone. this can easily be facebook for adults – when they have contributed content (family member contact information, media, ?blogging?) it will be plenty sticky.
facebook for adults… what was myspace again?
Wow…bring sweet memories of the bubble back….
btw what’s their business model?
This information is easy to monetize, even without repeat users. Need to send out wedding invitations or birth announcements? Pull the addresses from Genie. Putting together a family reunion? Pull the family info from Genie. Want to send an e-birthday card to your mom’s 2nd cousins daughter but don’t want to have to remember? Set Genie to do it for you.
Now, imagine if Genie had affiliates printing the wedding invites or birth announcements and mailing them out for you? Affiliates for making T-shirts for the family reunion. Affiliates for buying Christmas gifts and having them sent automatically…on and on and on.
Data about relationships between people is perhaps the most valuable kind of data there is simply because “relationships” lead to transactions, which can cost money. Genie is compiling a network of the most valuable of those relationships: family.
With that kind of early growth, they are going to really have to screw up not to be a nice, viable, profitable site. On the other hand, if they just cover it with Google Ads (LAZY), I’ll be the first to pile on.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen one mention of myfamily.com, ancestry.com, or CMGI – i.e. internet bubble #1 companies – in this post or the comments!
Come on folks, is memory that short?
How is this thing different from the most prominent genealogy site competitors? It uses Flash? How is that “web 2.0″?
Some people are missing the value…
You could eventually build services using the network. Imagine, instead of using eBay to buy and sell, you use your REAL network… Obviously you’re going to trust a person that is 10 degrees away from your family than someone who is 100 degrees away.
Perhaps the “family” aspect isn’t perfect, but doing something similar with a user’s real social network would be pretty sweet. Imagine, the largest social network visualization based on a user’s current communication. As far as I’m concerned, people wouldn’t even need to register — it’d be purely mapping.
Michael,
It looks like you struck a nerve with this one. What’s your opinion of the opportunity for other players in this space. E.g have you looked at Amiglia (www.amiglia.com)?
Velioncho, permanent hater: exactly. This is not an incredibly “sticky” service that is going to keep people coming back day after day. Does every online business have to be “sticky”? Of course not, but it does help in many ways.
I do think that there are some premium service possibilities here, but let’s not forget that there are already a significant number of premium online genealogy services out there that Geni would have to compete with.
The bottom line is that right now, an exit strategy for Geni just became a whole lot more difficult. The growth is impressive, but we don’t know how many people are *actively* using the service on a regular basis or who are just signing up once and basically leaving after that. I just don’t see how 100,000 users, no matter how quickly acquired, creates a $100 million business just seven weeks after launch. More evidence of a growing bubble in my opinion.
Wow – I wasn’t expecting to wake up to this today. It’s good news for my start-up I guess.
I don’t get the valuation of this either UNLESS they have other plans for it. They have to. I used it, and I”ve not been back since. I can’t imagine any plans they have to monetize it being very interesting.
So I really wonder how they will monetize this. I think this is really crazy.
I was really hoping Geni.com would be more of a competitor to the whole Ancestry.com suite of genealogy sites. Instead its like myspace but with a family twist. Geni.com has no real use to Genealogists which is sad. The site is only useful for living relatives and you should already know about those relations. If Geni.com is valued at 100 million then a site like Digg.com would be valued at what 1 billion?
$100M?
*has heart attack*
ARE YOU JOKING??
@ permanent hater
MyFamily/Ancestry is doing over $100 million in revenue. There’s obviously a good market for people who actually like their relatives.
I keep hearing a stat that says that one of the top 10 things people do on the internet is family history. If that’s true, this could have wheels. It seems a long way off of cash flow though. Ancestry.com seems to be doing pretty well with the whole subscription thing, but I hope theres another way.
there are no legs to this body.
@Jeff, I am not sure about your $100M/yr in revenue for Ancestry? I think that’s a llittle bit high although they might be reaching it but still seems high. They have MyFamily ($30yr), Geneaology.com and Ancestry.com($150/yr subscription). MyFamily was created as a feeder to Ancestry. So now they’re trying to relaunch MyFamily to get new users. The problem is that their users have peaked out b/c doing genealogical research takes a lot of time, a lot of passion, and a LOT of patience. Usually 3 things lacking in the majority who might use it. And the hard core geneaology crowd is a bit eclectic.
None of them get it right IMHO.
I wish there were more sites that were easy to use but also focused on user generated content. Findagrave.com started out as a hobby site for finding famous graves and then it took off with people wanting to add their own family cemetery photos and information. They now have 14 million cemetery records that are searchable. The site isn’t ‘web 2.0′ but its free to use and seems to have a big following. Rootsweb.com which I believe is owned by MyFamily is also a large place for genealogy user content but its navigation and design is lacking.
For all the doubters of geni’s business, when was the last time you talked to your family? extended family? and how well do you really know these people you call family? i admit that i have very superficial knowledge about my family, but it’s not because i don’t care. If Myspace can have that much traffic of people who’re trying to get acquainted and connect with people they don’t even know or barely know, my hope for humanity is that we spend just as much time caring about our family.
It will be interesting to see how the race for this family / genealogy space turns out. Amiglia, ourstory, and now geni… seems like it’s still up for grabs, though that’s one big valuation to live up to.
can anyone tell me how sites like these get 100K users in just a few weeks? Do vc’s have a secret mailing list? Hehe.
PS just tried to use Geni again and it’s still quite buggy. Keeps stalling on editing a person and giving me errors for the past 30 min.
@ Amy
Last week the Salt Lake Tribune reported there are 900k subscribers using the site. Here’s the text from the article on Paul Allen’s blog: http://www.paul...alogy-startups/. I live about a mile from Ancestry’s campus and it’s pretty common knowledge in these parts that they’re a $150M company. I might be off by $10M or so, but …
All of us here in Utah are hoping that Ancestry’s management catches the 2.0 vision and loosens the fetters on their database, but I doubt it will happen. Unfortunately, I see Geni as the polar opposite of Ancestry — a cool free resource with what seems to be a weak business model. Hopefully they’ll find the middle ground and provide a viable alternative to the old school subscription-only model.
The investors are probably thinking about all those Anna-Nicole-Smith-like lawsuits and how they can use Geni to claim those money.
[j/k]
@ Jeff J, I’ve seen Ancestry often quoted at 900,000 subscribers, but they are often vague on which ones are ancestry.com subscribers (@ $150/yr) vs. myfamily.com subscribers ($30/yr). And whether they include “invited” members into the subscription numbers or not. Anyway it’s all just spin. (I say this b/c of ex-myfamily.com worker colleague friends of mine said it first). Anyway they are still the biggest.
guessing a good bit of that valuation is based on David Sacks (PayPal, Thank You For Smoking) & Alan Braverman (YahooGroups, Xoom) reputation… but i also bet their early user adoption #’s are quite impressive.
congrats to Sacks & Alan… and to CRV.
I’m very surprised at that. Good think that Sampa.com will surpass Geni on the next few weeks in Reach (according to Alexa). How much will Sampa be worth then?
http://www.alex...pa.com+geni.com
Sampa is all sweat work so far.
You don’t need to speculate about how big Ancestry.com is – they just ran it in the WSJ http://online.w...ON=wsjie/6month
– it’s $150MM a year
I don’t see why they are so excited about 100,000 trees. The same WSJ story says Ancestry just added 1 million trees over the last few months. So what should their valuation be – 1 billion?
I’m sorry but it just to me sounds inflated that Ancestry is adding 1M trees in a few months. The site is for serious genealogy people doing research and building a tree from that (myfamily is the “fluffy” side). The $150/year price point is also prohibitive to a lot of people. I just doubt there are 1M people in the past few months paying $150 each. A tree has several branches, so is each new person /branch on the tree a new “tree”?
I’m not knocking Ancestry, I’m questioning the figures being tossed around cavalierly to make themselves look better (heck I’d do it too if it made sense and isn’t NOT true). And I see their ads about so I know they’re doing a big marketing push right now which is probably driving up figured, but still.
I don’t pay for the WSJ online so I can’t read the full article, sorry.
Ancestry.com is much bigger than Geni.com. And building a family tree is free. So is uploading photos, stories, docs… It’s different tree experience, because it is designed to get you to pay them for access to a huge database of actual historical records and something like five years of family trees previously uploaded to the site. I think they have stitched them together into a single tree. They are years ahead of geni. It’s actually a pretty cool site these days, with much more 2.0 feel… They don’t need $10 million investment they are so profitable, but I think they are aggresive and have hired some good people in utah and Seattle. Alexa comparison:
http://www.alex...ww.ancestry.com
Check http://www.myheritage.com and see what a REAL genealogy site is all about.
i agree that Geni needs to device more new ways to generate revenue
They keep SPAMMING my family! I joined Geni a few weeks ago and invited my family members to join and add to our family tree. In the past few days Geni has repeately emailed my family without my consent.
I find their emailing tactics very unprofesional and disrespectful.
My advice: do NOT join Geni.
I want to clarify my last post:
Geni keeps sending emails to my family with messages suggesting that I sent them, but I neither sent them nor requested for them to be sent.
A normal email to someone is ok. However, I find it wrong for Geni to pose emails as though they are sent by me to my family. I am no longer recommending Geni.
Ref: comment #19,
The commentor is right and all of these things should be included. It ties right into what I created some years back which is a document I call “The Donahoos and Then Some”. We have a large family (when we get together there are fifty of us) and of course siblings, cousins, aunts & uncles and them some. Not everyone has the techncal equipment to store this info on so I created a four fold-out document with all the information for everyone to get in touch with each other. More important was it also made it possible for my children to get to know the rest of the family that they were not familiar with. And, you know, they use it and now we have a closer family group.
My advice join: http://www.zooof.com
. 35 Languages, amazing viral flash tree, growing step by step, launched in a private beta one month before Geni, still in the romantic ‘garage stage’. Started as an art project to unite the world in 12 familylevels! Company based in Amsterdam, so we take it easy but watch us coming!
Geni.com is such a great idea! I just did a blog post about Geni.com over on Highbrid Nation if you want to check it out. I look forward to building my tree and maybe meeting some new family members along the way. I think the site has a great future.
This is so exiting. people can not imagine how important this will be for the online future. There will be times when a familily member will not even remember that you exist and today we will be sorprise how cool it would be to find our forgotten family members. It will be more amazing if they add google maps so that we can see exactly their physical location.
Easily the most frustrating site I have every used. Not only is it frustratingly viral (it won’t leave you alone), in my case it makes it impossible to connect with my real family. The lay out the exciting opportunity and frustratingly prevent your from realizing it.
I hope there is something better out there.