VentureBeat

updated
Visible Path, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers companies a way for their employees to how their personal contacts are linked to others in their organization and elsewhere, has been bought by a multibillion, international company, according to this CNET article.

Visible Path has remained focused on serving companies — even as more popular consumer-focused networks such as LinkedIn, and now Facebook, have grabbed attention. It’s not clear whether Visibile Path was making money (we wrote about the company here, when it changed its chief executive a few months ago, and started shaking itself up a bit). The news comes as companies get more serious about providing social software to their employees.

We reported earlier about how News Corp. is negotiating to buy LinkedIn.

Visible Path’s service tracks how often you email certain people, how frequently those people respond, and then builds a ranking of your richest contacts, and shows you how those contacts, in turn, are connected with others. It lets you know which of your contacts you can draw on to help reach someone else you might not otherwise know.

Visible Path was working away for years. It was very early to the sector, but wasn’t able to exploit is as quickly as others have. It was backed with $22,7 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures, and Integral Capital Partners.

Update: This version corrected an earlier version that suggested Pringo had acquired Visible Path. That information was clearly wrong.

Visible Path, an early professional social networking company backed by big-name venture capitalists, dropped off the public radar in recent years. But it’s trying to change that.

The Foster City, Calif. company has made two moves to bring new focus: hiring a new chief executive, Cary Rosenzweig, and integrating its technology with the popular online software company, Salesforce.

For years, it has been quietly trying to sell its service to companies. Lately though, free or semi-free services offered by LinkedIn and Jigsaw have enjoyed broader publicity.

Visible Path is not commenting on its revenue, the number of paying customers or whether it is nearing profitability. [Update: The company now tells us it was privately working with more than 400 enterprise customers up through April, when it launched an online, free-plus-premium-services version available to smaller businesses and individuals. It now has over 3,500 companies on board, some with only a few users, some with hundreds.]

Visible Path does offer its own twist: It lets an employee see the depth of the connections they have with other employees and executives up the chain of command. It does so by observing behavior in Outlook, for example the amount of email two people have sent each other and and calendar meetings they’ve scheduled. It also gives them insight into which of their colleagues may have an inside connection with a potential client they’re trying to reach.

Since 2002, the company has raised $22.7 million from Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures and Integral Capital Partners, with $17 million of that coming last year. The company says it plans to integrate with Gmail and other popular email programs, as well.

Besides Salesforce, other partners include Intel-supported Suite Two, LexisNexis and Hoover’s. For example LexisNexis uses Visible Path for its ExecRelate service (screenshot below), which launched last week. ExecRelate provides information about the connections between companies’ executives and boards of directors using LexisNexis data.

Rosenzweig was general manager of the Quickbooks Payroll arm of Intuit. Co-founder and outgoing chief executive Antony Brydon moves to VP of Product.