Skype Co-Founding Engineers Invest In Pet Social Network

[TechCrunch]

Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype has invested $235,000 USD in United Dogs and Cats Ltd, an Estonian startup that offers localized social networking sites for lovers of dogs and cats.

UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com offers traditional social networking tools such as blogs, profile pages and photo sharing to pet lovers, and is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Combined the sites have over 40,000 members, not enough for it to be counted by comScore, although the new Alexa notes that UnitedDogs is a top 1000 site in Luthiana and also scores well in Malaysia and Indonesia.
UnitedDogs.com compares well to competitor PawSpot (our review) in terms of traffic but still lags (or should that be wags…) well behind market leader Dogster.

This is the second investment in United Dogs and Cats by Ambient Sound Investments, having provided an undisclosed Angel Round in October 2007. See also ASI’s May 2007 investment in Freenzo. The additional investment takes ASI’s stake in the company to 18%.
The new money will be used to expand the reach of the UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com.




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[Gandalf]

Hey, I love my dogs, but this seems just a wee bit excessive to me. Or am I the only one???

[Yahooligan]

Nope. There are at least two of us who think this idea is nutty. But then... have you ever seen "Best in Show?" Some owners...