BranchOut Surpasses 25 Million Users

Sites include branchout.com . Published on May 1st, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

The professional social networking space is heating up and Linkedin may soon have to start watching its heels. Just a few stories back we covered Paris based Viadeo, a professional social network with over 35 million users. And today we are covering Branchout, another offering which according to its CEO and founder Rick Marini, the platform now has over 25 million users.

Branchout piggybacks off Facebook as the platform is built upon Facebook integration—not a bad model when you consider that Zynga does millions from this very setup. As a growing professional social network Branchout has attracted several big-name VCs in the past, and it seems that love affair is continuing. The company announced recently that it had secured $25 million in Series C funding led by Mayfield Fund. Joining Mayfield were previous investors Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

With this latest round of capital injection, total funding for Branchout sits at $49 million and Marini is reporting that every three seconds a user joins the site. The plan is to make Branchout more competitive with Linkedin, a company which is now public and making strides in the professional social networking space.

But while Linkedin is good at attracting big shot executives, Marini and his team prefers to focus on the other 90% as he calls it—recent college grads and the like. That is certainly a big pool so let’s watch how Branchout develops over the coming months.