Geni Gets Another $5 Million for Social Networking and Genealogy Site: What About Yammer?
According to Dan Primack on peHub, Geni, the popular genealogy and social networking site founded by PayPal's David Sacks, just raised another $5 million in a Series C round backed by Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund. In early 2007, Geni raised a total of $1.5 million in a series A round led by The Founders Fund and another $10 million is a series B round led by Charles River Ventures.
While Geni itself is a popular service, a lot of attention has lately gone to Yammer, a side project that grew out of the same company and which is a Twitter-like service geared towards enterprise users. It is not clear if any of the money raised in this latest round will go towards expanding Yammer.
What About Yammer?
Yammer's story is similar to Twitter's, in that both projects were originally nothing more than side projects. Twitter, however, turned out to be the more lucrative project for Odeo. According to the publically available data, Geni is still growing at a steady clip, however, while Yammer, following an impressive growth spurt after its launch, is in slow decline.
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Yammer is a business "killer app" that my work group uses. It allows each group to have a private "twitter-like" feed. As a result, I post to this group and other groups in my business "nmusd.us" and follow this in My Feed.
One human problem. If one posts in My Feed, something that is private for a group. Everyone sees it. Not good. Twitter doesn't have the feature set of Yammer. It will sad when it fails.
We've got staffers spread across the country and Yammer has been absolutely awesome for us. Interestingly I see the biggest market for Yammer not in large companies, but rather in small to midsize companies.
Here is a longer writeup about our experience with yammer:
http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/using-yammer-to-communicate-within-our-company
Was this an up-round for Geni? If I remember correctly, their $10 million round was at a $100M (not sure if it was pre or post). Were they able to sustain this valuation in this economic environment?
Geni's traffic isn't growing at all relative to the rest of the family history vertical - http://siteanalytics.compete.com/geni.com+ancestry.com+familysearch.org/?metric=uv
How can something very simple like a genealogy web-app costs around $15 mils to date, to be developed and maintained? This is beyond common sense.
I suppose twitter is the leader and its growing at a superb rate...there have instances in which twitter has reported news before any media companies.
www.ZaaBiz.Com
Any thoughts on why Yammer vs Campfire?
Geni still has potential, but they seem to be squandering it a bit. They've cut down or limited a number of the features they had initially, or turned free services into paid services. Their user community is up in arms after the most recent downgrade, and the Geni management doesn't seem to pay much attention to them. In the meantime, later competitors that essentially copied Geni's idea and interface, like verwandt.de, are growing rapidly in multiple markets. Geni still hasn't gotten around to implementing interfaces in other languages than English, despite that enthusiastic users supplied the translations to them many months ago.