05-16-2012

Our investment in Mocavo

by Seth Levine

Today Mocavo announced that Foundry has led a Series A investment in the business. Since launching in March of 2011, Mocavo has worked to create a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. And while the genealogy is a large (and growing) market, the companies that have focused on this space have generally concentrated on building proprietary data assets that they have made available to subscribers to their services, rather than focusing on the tools by which genealogists access those data.

With more and more historical information now coming online, with more of these data tucked away in disparate corners of the internet, and with the horizontal search engines not indexing these data, Mocavo has recognized the need in the market for a vertical search tool focused on genealogy. Additionally, genealogy searching is an inherently social experience, often something undertaken by several members of a family. But existing tools lack social features – either for working collaboratively or for sharing the results of that work with other family members. Mocavo is addressing these shortcomings as well by adding to the Mocavo search platform the ability for users to easily work collaboratively and to share their work with others either on the Mocavo platform or on other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

We’re thrilled to be working with Cliff, Richard, Andy, Ryan and the rest of the team at Mocavo with whom we share a vision and a passion around the future of genealogy search.