Updated
Make-your-own-social-network company Ning has raised a $60 million fourth round of funding.
Co-founder Marc Andreessen, who also founded Netscape, says the funding came at a whopping $500 million pre-money valuation. That’s almost three times the Palo Alto, Calif. startup’s $170 million valuation back in July, when it raised a $44 million third round. Even back then, Ning was something of a poster child for huge (and, some argued, overinflated) Web 2.0 valuations. With the economic downturn, we thought the days of such valuations were over, but it looks like we were wrong.
It’s not clear what Ning, which allows you to create and customize your own social network, is going to do with all this cash, since social network companies don’t usually need a lot of capital. On the other hand, its traffic has been growing like crazy — between February of 2007 and 2008, traffic increased by 4,803 percent, to 4 million visits. And Randy Befumo, research director at previous Ning investor Legg Mason Opportunity Trust, has said the company needs money to build the infrastructure for growth.
(In the latter article, we argue that Ning’s numbers — particularly the fact that 115,000 social networks were created using its platform — aren’t necessarily as meaningful as the site’s usage.)
You can read Fast Company’s new in-depth profile of Ning here.
Update: Marc Andreessen just emailed us. Here’s what he said:
The valuation was $500M pre-money, about $560M post-money.
The size of the round was the money we have raised minus a fee to Allen & Company. About $60M net.
We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.
Tags: co:Ning, inv:Legg Mason Opportunity Trust11 Comments
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TekWek said:
wow you’ve gotta be kidding me….I know Marc likes cheap money….but how much money do you need to run something like Ning
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Charlie Prince said:
half a billion for p*** social networks - who knew
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mike@gmail.com said:
Read Marc’s blog, this is very much his strategy with these things.
It makes sense though. He’s got a record I think he wants to maintain of always coming out on top, rather than risking it all for the big google like payoff.
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Allan said:
It’s probably smart to raise a ton of money now - VCs will start to hunker down as the public markets try and recover from the recent correction.
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Xoost.com said:
If that is true TWITTER is worth $5 billion, right now.
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Sophia said:
Amazing-!
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Chevy Dowreck said:
Wow. Andreeesssen is a regular Adaam Smith and Alaan Greeenspaan in one.
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Richard Dale-Mesaros said:
I went to Ning and took a quick look at social networks for real estate investing - there were about 200. I decided to sign up on several, but when I realized you had to fill out a complete profile for each of these mini networks, it thought “To hell with this!” and moved on. It should be interesting to see how successful they are, seeing as their platform is standardized across the board; some folks might need a network more specific to their needs and stick with the leaders in their industry etc.
Thanks for the update!
Richard :)
Chief Deal Weaver
http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com -
Mikey said:
wow
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Anny Ortiz said:
It is great, good learnings!
Thank you!
Anny
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Anny Ortiz said:
First time visitor, great!
Thank you!
Anny
28 Trackbacks
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[...] see the real winners will be niche networks. This is an easy thing to assert following Ning’s $500 million valuation. I could dissect the pro and cons of the Ning business model but I will save that for another day. [...]
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The Downfall of Large Social Networks - Covering All That's Social All the Web said:
[...] see the real winners will be niche networks. This is an easy thing to assert following Ning’s $500 million valuation. I could dissect the pro and cons of the Ning business model but I will save that for another day. [...]
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