Geni: 5 million Profiles In 5 Months

We just got word that genealogy site Geni will be announcing that they’ve hit their 5 millionth profile, just five months after launching the service. This is up from 2 million in March. You can view the press release here.

This is not the number of registered users (Geni had 100,000 when reporting 2 million profiles), but rather the number of people put into Geni family trees. A user, after adding themselves, begins to add other people. If you include an email, that user is notified of the existence of the tree and can choose to sign up or not. Every non-deceased person who’s added, therefore, is a potential Geni user. That single viral component to the service will ensure orders of magnitude greater growth compared to established competitors like ancestry.com.

Geni has raised a total of $11.5 million in capital – the last round was $10 million on a $100 million valuation. They continue to add features that have proven to be successful at creating growth at Facebook and other social networks, suggesting that valuation may not be as crazy as it seems at first blush.