London-based family tree social network Kindo today announced a round of funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI). The Estonian investment company joins seed investors Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stafan Glanzer, the initial investor of Last.fm.
Users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones. Unlike a lot of English-only social networks these days, Kindo has a particular focus on the international landscape. The site currently supports 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
The investment round was led by Eileen Broch, who stated in the press release, “In the short time since they’ve been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most.“
Kindo’s main competitor in the family tree space is Geni, whose previously raised round gave it an astonishing $100 million valuation pre-launch. Having tried both products, I have to say Kindo and Geni square it off in a very tough fight when it comes to user interface, features, and the overall user experience. Being a long-time Geni user, I have no intentions of switching my family-tree of 1,000, but Kindo puts up a very compelling offer.
With the investment in Kindo and Geni’s 6 million user market lead, the family tree networking space is off to only a start and I think will be a rapidly growing space of 2008. It’s one of the ideas that we’ve yet to solve since the first family tree site from back in 1995, and with competition on the rise, the market seems more and more compelling to new users and families who would like to digitize their roots.
