14
February
2012
|
17:13 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Pearltrees Announces $6.7m Funding Says It Will Start Charging For Premium Services

Congratulations to Pearltrees, (a former client) on raising 5 million Euros, about $6.7 million in Series B funding. The Paris-based company offers a web service that groups users' selected web pages into collections of "pearls" - visual metaphors that can be shared and collected online by others.

Here are more details from Pearltrees on the funding and its "freemium" plan, which will start charging some of its users for premium services.

The Group Accueil, a privately held, diversified corporation that had invested previously, led the round. The new capital will allow the company to scale the product and monetize the service.

"Pearltrees has leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web" says Pearltrees' CEO Patrice Lamothe.

The company's unique social system lets users curate the web pages they like, connect to other users through common interests and organize topics curated by other users in a collaborative way.

The company's algorithm "TreeRank" interprets and exposes this graph through the product's discovery feature.

"As a consequence, Pearltrees harnesses the power of people to organize and discover the most valuable content on the web," adds Lamothe.

The current infusion of capital will allow Pearltrees to scale the product and to implement the company's freemium business model.

Since the company's launch in December 2009, Pearltrees has grown at a consistent rate of 15 percent per month.

More than 25 percent of users are American and 75 percent are equally distributed on all five continents.

Pearltrees has raised a total of 8.5 million Euros from a group of international entrepreneurs and angel investors.

About Groupe Accueil:

Groupe Accueil is a family holding company founded over one hundred years ago. It operates in publishing, software, trading, real estate development and agriculture.