$30m investment for new Social Network
29th of January 2008 by conor
The buzz on the Twitter lines is all about stealth Irish start-up MOLI raising $30m in private investment. According to the Silicon Republic article, they have 55 employees and are based in the Digital Hub. They are supposedly concerned with managing multiple SocNet profiles from one account.
This sounds like it could be very useful, particularly if it dovetails in with all the current efforts around data portability.
Further descriptions muddy the waters slightly with mentions of “professionally-produced content coupled with interactive e-commerce features enabling members to connect and conduct business with other discerning individuals, groups and businesses”. There are hints of LinkedIn, Facebook, PodTech, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon in that one sentence.
You can sign-up for free on the site now and I’m off to have a good poke around. The design and production levels seems very high indeed. It also looks like they are the only company based here that has a slot at DEMO 08.
It’s fantastic to see high net worth individuals investing serious sums of money in the Web2 space in Ireland. We’re keeping a close eye on Ammado in that context too. Surely this is just the tip of the iceberg for those looking to add a bit of excitement to their investment portfolios?
UPDATE 1: Further scratching seems to reveal that they allow multiple profiles within their site, not across SocNets. Therefore are they positioning themselves as YASN with a demographic focus on late 20′s/early 30′s? i.e. somewhere between Facebook and LinkedIn.
4 Responses to “$30m investment for new Social Network”
Paul Fallon
January 29th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Nice write up! Just a FYI, Silicon Republic is giving a slight wrong picture of Moli, their EMEA HQ is here, with most of the staff of Mainstream Holdings group based in Florida USA, including MOLI.com and its sister companies and have been live and open for business for 6+ months now. So calling it Irish is a bit of a strecth
hth,
/Paul
Conor O'Neill
January 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Good to know. Seemed odd that no-one knew anything about them until today. Where is the bulk of that 55 based? CEO location?
Paul Fallon
January 30th, 2008 at 5:01 am
AFAIK most of the folks are based in Florida, as well is CEO.
Conor O'Neill
January 30th, 2008 at 5:17 am
The whole thing gets curioser and curioser. Well, at least they got on TC USA!
I want to dig more into the functionality of the site and what genuine benefits it provides. Many FB fans would claim that this type of filtering can already be done on FB if you are sensible about the level of sharing you do on things.
I have a simple rule of thumb, if I don’t want people to see stuff, I don’t put it on the web, period. Family-only pics are about the only thing I don’t make public and even then, URL obfuscation is sufficient.