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.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/verwandt.de), Polish/ moikrewni.pl (ttp://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/moikrewni.pl), or Spanish/ miparentela.com (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/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
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…