Mocavo is a genealogy website that launched in March of 2011. Recently, the company raised $4 million. It came from an investment by Foundry Group. This funding should help Mocavo to grow and to offer more to the genealogists who use it.
Have you used Mocavo? It is a start up company that is located in Boulder, Colorado. It was founded by Cliff Shaw, who is the person who founded four other companies (that have since been acquired by Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com). Genealogists can use Mocavo for free without having to sign up for a membership. It is the first genealogy website to incorporate a large scale search engine.
Cliff Shaw started Mocavo because he noticed a big problem that genealogy always had. People need to find information in order to do their genealogy research. That important information is scattered across thousands of different websites. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for genealogists to find what they are searching for.
The Mocavo website uses software that aggregates information from several different websites, and conveniently connects it to the search engine located at the Mocavo website. Suddenly, it becomes a whole lot easier for genealogists to find what they are looking for!
Mocavo recently raised $4 million. It came from The Foundry Group, which is an investment firm that is also located in Boulder, Colorado. The money will be used to bulk up Mocavo’s engineering and development team.
Right now, Mocavo has ten employees. Nine of them are based in Boulder. The company is expecting to double in size by next year. They are hiring software developers, graphic designers and customer support managers. Mocavo is also welcoming the Foundry Group Managing Director, Seth Levine, to the Mocavo board of directors.
There is a blog post on the Foundry Group website that talks about this news. It points out that many other genealogy websites focus on gathering data assets. In other words, they focus on incorporating as many categories of records that they can. I’ve noticed that several of them will not give access to these collections to users until after a genealogist pays for a membership.
This is where Mocavo is different. The company has, instead, focused on creating a genealogy search engine platform that gives genealogists the best tools that are available on the internet to help them find the information about their ancestors. It is also working on adding a feature that would allow several genealogists within a family to share their work with others through Mocavo or on Twitter or Facebook.
Image by Aidan Grey on Flickr