Genealogy social network Verwandt has raised an undisclosed series B from Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV), said to be in the “multi-million-dollars” but otherwise undisclosed. They closed their first round in July 2007 from Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners.
Verwandt was originally a clone of Geni.com (although Geni has evolved significantly since then and now has photos, a family news feed, etc.) and launched six months after. Despite releasing later, Verwandt claims to have grown at a faster rate than Geni, adding one million family trees and 9.5 million profiles in the first five months compared to Geni’s 4.5 million after launch. Verwandt now says they have over 1.4 million families and 16 million profiles. Germany makes up about a third of their traffic.
The tremendous growth can at least in part be attributed to the site’s availability in multiple languages. Verwandt is available to users in German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Verwandt also has Gedcom import/export, which allows family tree data to be moved around to different applications. A lot of Verwandt’s growth has likely come from Gedcom import data. CEO Sven Schmidt says imports make up less than 5% of their profiles. Geni has export capabilities now, import is coming soon.
Geni was fun for a bit but my family gets more use out of the communication-focused FamSpam.
Hi Nick, hi Techcrunch-Team!
Disclosure: I am the co-founder of verwandt.de.
Appreciate the post. Just two minor “additions”:
* We operate in each market under an own domain! Hence, one needs to look at different Alexa charts. E.g. German/ verwandt.de (http://www.alex...ils/verwandt.de), Polish/ moikrewni.pl (ttp://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/moikrewni.pl), or Spanish/ miparentela.com (http://www.alex...miparentela.com). Germany makes up approx. a third of our total traffic
* In addition, please note that Gedcom imports make up less than 5 percent of our total profiles. We have over 16 million profiles that were generated on our website by users themselves
Best, Sven from verwandt.de
So… Sven…. You didn’t mention that you are void of any kind of intelligence or ideas if all you can do is take someone else’s idea, slap some different colors on it, and ride the gravy train to “success”.
I mean, seriously, you couldn’t have come up with any of your own ideas? None at all outside of swapping the order of the “print the tree” and the “view in full page” buttons?
You are a fraud dude! And you and all the other Clone low-lifes give Germany an even worse name.
So what do you do during the course of a day since you don’t actually use your intelligence and have no ideas and have others do the work you steal?
You even sensor your forum for any mention of Geni.com (Oops, Google archives, douche!). How much more proof does one need that you know you are a fraud. You are so insecure that you won’t even allow discussion or mention of it; hence you being a low-life. Go tell your mother what a fraud you are, you joke!!!
Didn’t Geni have a $100M valuation? What happened to the cash they injected a year ago. Tesla sports cars?!?
Hey Sven,
Where did those 1.4 Million tree starters come from? Is this traffic bought? Since your average family tree only has 10 profiles in it, looks like people are checking the site out, then leaving.
Hi Frank (#4)!
We currently have 12 profiles per tree. Please note that most of our trees are very “young”, since our rapid growth started approx. 2.5 months ago. “Older” trees have more profiles.
If I recall Geni.com´s number correctly, they have about the same ratio. All players have the goal to grow that number, us included.
Our trees originate from PR, word of mouth, SEO as well as some from online marketing. We are making use of all “distribution channels”.
You are right: Some people only check the site out. We must offer more and better features to make them come back on a regular basis. Hence, we are rolling out our “Facebook-for-Families-Feature-Initiative”!
Disclosure: I am the co-founder of verwandt.de!
Best, Sven from verwandt.de-Team
MyBlogLog wants it’s logo back
You never talked about the French leader :
http://www.genealogie.com
This website claims on its homepage :
3.227.274 members
2.537.009 family trees
57.633.994 profiles
On a user point of view I still like more Genoom (http://www.genoom.com), it’s cute, has all the languages, Gedcom imp/exp and even more features… Don’t know about the money they raised…
Great, Joseph, now you have done it. Ol’ Sven is going to go drop by genoom.com and have some ideas that he can promote as his own.
Oh, Sven, again…. You are a joke! Go tell your wife and daughter what a fraud you are.
What is the point with using a genealogy site that only let you see up to your third cousins? Geni uses “everyone’s related” in their logo, however they will not let you know how, so it’s pretty useless .
Geni is the worst offender of all the Genealogy sites when it comes to security, they have so many security bugs that easily allows unauthorized access to private data.
If you register your relatives email, you can expect Geni to target these registered emails with excessive spam. You relatives will not thank you for adding them to Geni, but curse you for the 3 mails-a-day from Geni.
Geni has aggressively pushed features such as “virtual gifts” in order to cash in on users. You can expect them to exploit any opportunity to cash in on any of your relatives no matter age in the near future.
Geni is a hungry moneytrap for your family and I would definitely not recommend anyone using it. Just read their user forum and see how much criticism they get.
They should change their logo to “Geni – everyone’s retarded” since that is how they treat their userbase