Banking on the Wiki Way: AboutUs Secures $5 Million in Funding
AboutUs, the wiki that's working to capture detailed information about every site on the Web, has secured $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Voyager Capital with a $2.5 million investment.
How does a small startup secure capital in such turbulent economic times? Being profitable helps - something AboutUs achieved by mid-year 2008. The company is forecasting continued growth this year. CEO Ray King says the company is targeting $5 million in revenue for 2009. The primary source remains advertising, but the online marketing services AboutUs sells - including content creation and custom page development - continue to gain traction.
Another reason for investor confidence? The staff. AboutUs holds a special place in the world of wiki as the employer of Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, and they continue to attract new talent. They recently hired a number of new employees, including CFO Jack Williamson. King hopes to use the new funding to increase the size of the company to around 50 employees by the end of 2009, up from its current staff of 32.
AboutUs dynamically creates pages from publicly accessible information on Web sites, like meta tags and whois information. Once built, the pages - like any wiki - are available to be edited by the company, users, or anyone who visits the site. AboutUs also offers monitoring services to facilitate "reputation management" - knowing who is saying what about you where. When a monitored page is edited, users are alerted to both the change and the user who made the edit. And given that it's a wiki page, they can choose how best to deal with the edit.
For more information on the company and its offerings, visit the AboutUs page on AboutUs.org.
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Congrats to the AboutUs team. These guys do a great job of running a profitable, growing company while simultaneously maintaining wiki values in their organization. Great to see.
You are exactly right on why they were funded: great team and profitable.
What I don't get is why so many blogs are reporting this as a big surprise, considering the economic climate?
Good VC's still invest through tough times. They usually have funds that have been raised and their investors expect the money to be put to use, rather than just sit there. All that really happens during these economic times is that only the companies that really should be funded, get funded.
We need to stop thinking that a down economy means no VC money, that just isn't true.
Congrats, Aboutus team. Interesting business models.