London-based Kindo, a social network aimed at your living family-tree, has won undisclosed seed funding from Estonia-based Ambient Sound Investments, reports TechCrunch UK. (Why are they Estonian based? Because they are formed from Skype’s founding engineers). Also in the seed round is Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stefan Glanzer, first investor in last.fm and executive chairman until the acquisition last year by CBS.
Kindo covers the “next generation” family tree, with communication features, stats and a family ‘news feed’ not unlike a Facebook feed. Perhaps it’s stand-out proposition is that because it is already translated into 14 languages including Russian, Arabic and Chinese it will be aimed at groups traditionally associated with a tight-knit sense of family.
Other family networks tend to be about the dead (Ancestry.com is about ancestors) or genealogy (Geni.com) rather than your living family. Kindo has as much chance as any other site in this area, but being translated into so many languages from the word go creates a barrier to entry for a lot of competitors. [Update: It appears Genoom does do something similar to Kindo].
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