Estonia-based United Dogs and Cats, which operates two pet-specific community websites dubbed UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com, has raised €480,000 in VC funding. The money comes from individual investor Raivo Hein, the state-owned Estonian Development Fund and Ambient Sound Investments, the investment group led by co-founders of Skype that had previously seeded the startup with €170,000 of funding back in April 2008.
UDC first launched the two pet communities internationally about two years ago, and the nicely designed social networking services have quickly gained traction with cat and dog owners throughout Europe, in large part thanks to its localized nature with support for 16 languages. → Read More
Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype has invested $235,000 USD in United Dogs and Cats Ltd, an Estonian startup that offers localized social networking sites for lovers of dogs and cats. UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com offers traditional social networking tools such as blogs, profile pages and photo sharing to pet lovers, and is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Combined the sites have over 40,000 members, not enough for it to be counted by comScore, although the new Alexa notes that UnitedDogs is a top 1000 site in Luthiana and also scores well in Malaysia and Indonesia. UnitedDogs.com compares well to competitor PawSpot (our review) in terms of traffic but still lags (or should that be wags…) well behind market leader Dogster. This is the second investment in United Dogs and Cats by Ambient Sound Investments, having provided an undisclosed Angel Round in October 2007. See also ASI’s May 2007 investment in Freenzo. The additional investment takes ASI’s stake in the company to 18%. The new money will be used to expand the reach of the UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com. disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor in Dogster CrunchBase Information United Dogs and Cats Dogster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
