PEHub has reported a handful of new unannounced funding rounds based on recent SEC filings. Included among them are ancestry site Geni, which raised $5 million in Series C funding with investors including Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Geni’s team, which includes former PayPal exec David Sacks, is also behind TechCrunch50 winner Yammer, a Twitter-like service for businesses. We’ve reached out to Geni to confirm the news and will update this post once we do.
Update: Sacks has confirmed that Geni raised the $5 million round, and has also told us that Yammer has raised a $5 million Series A round.
Also included in the report is GoodGuide’s Series A round of $3.73 million with investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates. GoodGuide, another TechCrunch50 company, is building a database of consumer products that gauges how ‘good’ they are with respect to safety, the environment, and the community. The news was confirmed by VentureBeat.
Other investments reported include a $6 million round for Return Path with investors including Union Square Ventures, Mobius Venture Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Western Technology Investments. For more, check out the PEHub story.
i know last time Geni raised, it was at some crazy ($100M?) valuation. given the economy, anyone got guesses on where this round came in?
Good question, Doug! I’d like to know the answer to this question, too. According to Quantcast, they do 534K US uniques per month and 20M page views.
Jason, what is the new pre-money valuation? Is it an up-round?
Geni.com looks like a good concept. Does anyone know how many users they have accumulated?
For goodguide, is the data for products they provide reliable?
Go GoodGuide Go!
hello mükemmellik bu
goodguide is an awfully risky investment. the CPGs have their own ratings systems by industry and its all about getting shelf space recognition. i hope besides some cute ui and non-exclusive deals with NGOs there is something else there…otherwise yikes!
BEWARE of the privacy violations of this company. It’s INSANE that they aren’t showing any concern about their repeated releases of information. Check their forums for hundreds of their admittedly-most-active users complaining about the violations.
Geni could become a major success with their unique blend of genealogy and social networking.
Unfortunately they have a bit of trouble getting the formula right, and they have a somewhat strained relationship with their user community. Several times they’ve removed core features or turned formerly free services into paid subscriptions, despite repeated promises to do neither. Since their growth depends heavily on the enthousiasm of power users, and the power users increasingly feel betrayed and angry, the future of Geni is somewhat uncertain.
I have been a user of Geni since it’s quite early on and have been, until now, very enthusiastic about this site however as F Flemming points out users are feeling betrayed and angry as the service dwindles and features that initially attracted us to Geni are removed, decreased, or become available only with subscriptions. I have encouraged many people from my extended family to join Geni and now feel embarrassed as they career down hill.
I too agree with Flemming and Terry – I’m severely disappointed with the latest changes, and it appears that things are only going to get worse. The powerusers that Flemming mentioned aren’t just users, rather, they’ve contributed their ideas, their time, and so much more to build geni.com. Now, it appears that geni.com has decided to stop listening to these members.
I’m embarrassed about inviting some relatives because now I have to PAY to see how they’re related to me, and vise versa.
There are indeed many positives to geni.com, but bait and switching members really is upsetting.
I joined Geni a year and a half ago and was so excited to have found the site that seemed to be exactly what I had searched for….a free, flexible well designed genealogy site with lots of potential. Geni allowed for a lot of personalization and you could add photos and later the ability to add video and audio was added. Plus Geni fostered family collaboration. Kind of a mini facebook dedicated to keeping family in contact and working on their family tree together…How cool was that! In the last year Geni has been changing direction and severely hampering functionality. Geni needed to make money, we all understood that wanted to insure that they did so we would be assured of the Geni site for the future. However even though they told their users just before they announced their Pro, pay service that all “basic” functions and features (those developed and being used to that time) would always remain free……they begin downgrading and reducting of features and core services almost immediatel upon rolling out the Pro service, When I joined I could see my relationship calculated to anyone no matter how far removed, when Pro was announced that was changed and seriously downgraded, relationships would no longer be calculated beyond a very reduced point which I believe was 5th cousin for “free” users…Pro users could see more, now no one can see more than his 3rd cousins. So although this is supposedly a genealogy site, if you expand your tree beyond 3rd cousin you are seriouly impacted. You can’t see each other or know who those 3rd cousins may have invited from your extended family and added to the tree because you aren’t notified and probably won’t be able to see much of the info now without a lot of difficult micky mousing and sometimes not even then. This is really ridiculous when Geni is pushing it’s merging ability between trees and there is now one mega tree with over 8 million connected. But yahoo, you can’t see how you are related or where your tree is merged to another nor how it is related in the big tree. So why bother. I do not understand why Geni has deviated from their mission which was excellent. But the product is rapidly losing relevence for genealogists. Fleming above was correct when he said that many power and old time users of Geni are now up in arms and at odds with Geni due to the downgrading and dumbing down of the service. these users have spent hundreds and thousands of hours inputting data which is pretty much being held hostage as their is no way to get all your data off Geni at this time. Nor is there a way to print all your data off Geni….something one would have expected after the company had been out there for two years. Six months ago I would have given Geni 5 stars across the board, sadly I can not do that now. My hope is that Geni corrects itself and I can come back and write a better review and praise them for seeing the light…….one can always hope
I am considered among most Geni users as a GOD. I am the KING OF GENI. Everyone wants to be a part of MY TREE. Anyone that THINKS they are SPECIAL enough to JOIN MY TREE you need to ask ME for permission. GO ASK ANYONE IN THE FORUMS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU I AM GOD
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 misleading.
Geni is the worst offender of all the Genealogy sites when it comes to security, they have so many security bugs that easily allows unauthorised 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.
Like Judy, Flemming and Terry, I am a user on Geni who has contributed hundreds of individual profiles and helped enhance several tens if not hundreds of profiles via well-placed merges. I am also disappointed by the way Geni is handling this latest issue, downgrading with little warning and framing the downgrade as an upgrade.
Geni has the potential to become a truly great website and resource for families and genealogists alike. They also have the potential to drive away people faster than you can say “everyone’s related”. If they don’t get their act together, stop spamming people by default and limiting their family group to compensate, they might just find themselves in a ghost town – millions of profiles with no one to drive the new content.
Tamura Jones did a great aritcle about how geni.com is treating its members.
http://www.tamu...rumblings.xhtml
I promised to come back if and when Geni got back to its user base on correcting the issues that had made so many of its users unhappy. So I am Happy to say that Geni has finally come to its senses and is moving toward fixing things so that Pro and Basic users alike have the system they were promised. They have moved the defaults back to 4th cousins, not where it needs to be but in the right direction….and have promised to work on other enhancements and improvements that over time will restore the features we lost, such as the relationship calculator past the 4th cousin whie they tweak Geni for performance. They have hinted at a number of upcoming features, added a Facebook interface and have given back some free gifts that had been taken away. While the system does still need the the mentioned work and it took Geni much longer than in the past to respond, maybe those like me who were very vocal made an impact, ot maybe it was Facebook backing down this week as well from an unpopular move, anyway they have responded very positively, so I am very hopeful that things at Geni will continue to move forward, improve and fulfill the promise it has. There really isn’t a genealogy program out there that is better then Geni once the promised tweaking and restored functionality and new updates are added to what is currently offered. When Geni gets international language and localization rolled out and a good print/output module they will be the hottest ticket in the marketplace.
How does Geni compare to ancestry.com?