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. In the funding press release, CEO Patrice Lamothe says Pearltrees “leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web.”
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. The startup reached 1 million unique visitors adding up to 30 million pageviews last month. Lamothe tells me that the company’s goals for 2012 include continued multi-platform development (it’s already available on the Web and for the iPad, with an iPhone app coming soon), an API, and beginning the move to HTML5.
Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round.
Pearltrees is a visual and collaborative curation tool that allows users to collect, organize and share any URL they find online as well as to upload personal photos and notes.The product features a unique visual interface that allows users to drag and organize collected URLs into units called pearls that themselves can be further organized in a hierarchical structure with pearltrees, the company’s nomenclature for customizable folders that contain pearls (URLs). Users of the product can also engage in...
Patrice Lamothe is CEO and co-founder of Pearltrees, the social library. It lets you collect, organize and share everything you like. He’s an organization theory and media specialist. Previously, Patrice was project leader at BCG (Boston Consulting Group). He graduated from Ponts et Chaussees (99), Sc.Po Paris (00) and holds an MBA from INSEAD (04).
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