About.me has raised $11 million from investors and plans to revitalize the personal identity networking website, according to TechCrunch.
Co-founder Tony Conrad says the money will add features, make it more user friendly and will invigorate the site with the aim of “engaging the user base and motivating them to come back.”
The startup was first acquired in 2010 by AOL but was subsequently spun off a few days later and picked up by Conrad. The series B round of investments is spearheaded by True Ventures partner Conrad and Brad Feld, a partner in the venture capital firm the Foundry Group. Previous investment rounds included Google Ventures. The current total investment is now over $17 million.
The site is designed for users to create a page about themselves, so that people can visit it to find out just who they are and where they can find them online. About.me is positioning itself as different from LinkedIn and Facebook. “There are endless options in today’s world of how to depict yourself online, but there has yet to be a singular platform that gives individuals full control of their online identity,” Foundry Group’s Feld explained.
About.me has seen a huge increase in page views over the last year and a half. In January 2013 the site was gathering about four million page views each month. In May 2014 that number skyrocketed to 168 million views a month. Conrad attributes the huge increase in page hits to the adding of a variety of new features.
The page now lets the user make a sort of mosaic or “Pinterest for People” to tell the story of who they are. Moreover, Conrad says that sending messages to other users has been made easier. As far as making it easier to create a page, Conrad states that, “There’s a new set of editing tools we will launch at the beginning of July that will solve that, to make it easier to create a great page.”
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