LinkedIn Raised Its Big Round; $53 Million From Bain and Others; $1 Billion Valuation
By Rafat Ali - Tue 17 Jun 2008 05:44 PM PST
LinkedIn has closed its big round, which it had been working on for a while now in the midst of fielding some acquisition offers from strategics: it has received $53 million in funding, primarily from Bain Capital Ventures, the Boston-based PE firm. Other investors in the round include Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The investors received a combined 5 percent stake in Mountain View-based LinkedIn, and the new financing round values the company at $1 billion, NYT reports, which is certainly heady, but at least for a company which has revenues and a clearer business path than others. The company has been on the IPO-watch list for a while now, but this financing probably delays it, and then the public markets being what they are, waiting out with this ‘nuclear winter’ round makes sense.
This brings the total money raised by the company to over $80 million and it has said it would have revenue of $100 million for 2008. LinkedIn, which says it is already profitable, will use the investment to make acquisitions and expand its overseas operations. The NYT story also breaks down in more details the revenue sources for the company: LinkedIn will get only a quarter of its projected $100 million in revenue this year from ads; part of it is also the premium subscription, which let users directly contact any other user; and then the third source of revenue is recruitment tools that companies can use to find passive job seekers. Also, the service is adding company groups beyond its current focus on individual business user: One new product, Company Groups, automatically gathers all the employees from a company who use LinkedIn into a single, private forum.
BW: CEO Dan Nye, whose brother, Benjamin, is a partner at Bain ("That was convenient in terms of an introduction,” he notes), says LinkedIn didn’t need the funds for day-to-day operations. In fact, the company hasn’t yet spent a $12.8 million investment it took in January, 2007
Interesting that the company investors did a video about this investment, embedded below (a delicious skewering of the video, by Connie Loizos, here):
Pic courtesy: tychay .
Posted in: Information, Biz & Fin, Social Media, VC+M&A, Venture Capital
Tags: greylock partners, bessemer venture partners, bain capital, sequoia capital, linkedin,
