J&J swallows mother social networking site, Maya’s Mom

August 28, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

mayasmom2.bmpThe mother-focused site BabyCenter, owned by giant J&J, has acquired Maya’s Mom, a Palo Alto, Calif. social networking site for mothers.

This is the first sign of consolidation in the inflated sector of Mom 2.0.

A host of sites, from Minti to Mommybuzz, MothersClick, CafeMom and Momjunction have launched recently, raised cash, or otherwise moved aggressively to tap this niche. Internet sites focused on women are enjoying a boom, as more women come online: See our coverage of the mom sector here. CafeMom raised $5 million just last week.

Maya’s Mom was smart, raising a light round of angel funding from well known tech players, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Yahoo exec Jeff Ralston, Tickle founder James Currier, True Ventures and more. Raising minimal cash makes it easier to accept an acquisition offer. Sites raising lots of cash find it difficult because their investors set their expectations for a large return, and hold out for a price that may never come.

As we wrote at the time, the company describes itself as a cross between Yahoo Answers and Facebook. It is centered around the asking and answering of questions related to parenting.

The price is undisclosed. BabyCenter will use the company’s social networking technology across its own site, though Maya’s Mom will remain separate.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Congrats to MM, BabyCenter is a great fit, and I would suspect their competitors would be watching this acquisition and implementation with much interest.

    Just to give you a little more color on Minti...
    Minti launched in Beta in Mar 06.

    We are still going strong and the parenting space is a very personally rewarding space to be involved in.

    Matt - I take on board what you mention about raising small capital if you are looking for an easy early exit. We originally raised around USD$1.2M, however we are not solely focused on Minti. We have concentrated on the platform and are launching other verticals (have launched Refurber, and another vertical is soon to be launched), plus we are also licensing out our vibEngine platform (BuildingInLondon is already live and 2 big ones are in the pipeline).

    Kindest
    Clay Cook
    Minti Co-Founder