Serie B founding round

Pearltrees Raises $6.7M For Its “Collaborative Interest Graph” Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.

The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button. Following the lead from Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank, Pearltrees has named its technology TreeRank.

In essence, it’s offering its own version of the “interest graph”, a goal that many startups are chasing. Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and the company says it has been growing consistently at 15 percent per month, and that users have now created 15 million pearls which were assembled into 2 million trees. Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round. What the heck is an interest graph? Pearltrees raises $6.6M to show us.

Social curation startup Pearltrees has just sealed a deal for €5 million (around $6.6 million), all in the name of creating a better interest graph.

Much is being made in current social media circles of the “interest graph” concept, which is more about what you know than who you know, and which purportedly has strong connections to purchase intent and other matters of concern to online marketers. Put differently, while social networks like Facebook focus on what you have in common with your friends and how you react to friends’ recommendations, interest graph-based models (like the ones behind Pinterest, GetGlue or Foodspotting) make social connections based on shared interests, not the other way around. “Pearltrees has leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web,” said Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe in a release. “As a consequence, Pearltrees harnesses the power of people to organize and discover the most valuable content on the web”, he said. Pearltrees Closes Series B to Continue Curating the Web.

With 5 Million More Euros in the Bank, Pearltrees Gets Ready to Scale and Start Monetizing. The Paris-based social curation platform Pearltrees just announced that it has raised a Series B round of 5 million Euros (about $6.62 million USD).

The money is coming from Group Accueil, which had also invested in the service’s previous round. In total, Pearltrees has now raised 8.5 million Euros. The company, which launched its first alpha almost 3 years ago, aims to use this money to scale its product and – maybe even more importantly – implement a freemium business model for its service. The company did not publicly discuss what exactly this freemium model will look like. Pearltrees is probably best known for its highly visual interface to its collaborative curation service.

Pearltrees, according to its own data, had about 1 million unique visitors in January, which accounted for about 30 million pageviews. Pearltrees Raises $6.7M. Pearltrees raised $6.7 million in funding in a deal led by Groupe Accueil, according to a news report from Tech Crunch.

Here is the story. Pearltrees Raises $6.7M For Its “Collaborative Interest Graph” Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding. The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Following the lead from Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank, Pearltrees has named its technology TreeRank. Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and the company says it has been growing consistently at 15 percent per month, and that users have now created 15 million pearls which were assembled into 2 million trees. Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round. [Entretien exclu] Pearltrees lève 5 millions d’euros. C’est une nouvelle levée de fonds pour la start-up lancée en 2009.

Spécialisée dans la curation de contenus, Pearltrees avait réalisé 3 levées pour un montant total de 3.5 M€. Le groupe Accueil, société familiale diversifiée et présent dès le début, a principalement contribué à ce nouveau tour qui va servir à industrialiser et monétiser le service : développement mutliplateforme (web, iPad, et bientôt iPhone), ouverture de l’API et passage au Html 5.

Pearltrees lève 5 millions d'euros et prépare un modèle freemium. Loin de la Silicon Valley, les startups françaises dont l’unité de base en matière de levée de fonds est le million d’euros ne courent pas les rues.

C’est pourtant le cas de Pearltrees, qui vient de boucler son quatrième tour de table, avec cette fois une levée record dans sa jeune histoire : 5 millions d’euros. Pour ceux qui seraient passés à côté des épisodes précédentes, Pearltrees est un service web de « social curation », autrement dit un site qui permet de collectionner, organiser et partager toutes les trouvailles que l’on repère sur le web dans une page simple et conviviale, sous forme de « perles » regroupées en grappes thématiques, les « pearltrees ». 15 millions de perles ont été créées à ce jour par les membres du site. Si cela ne vous parle pas, je vous conseille juste d’essayer : c’est plus facile à utiliser qu’à expliquer. Le français Pearltrees lève 5 millions d'euros.