Wow! $30M Series A for a People Search Company
It’s easy to laugh off a $30 million Series A round for two largely unproven young entrepreneurs, in a space where there are a great many small players as well as large ones. But then, you might make the same mistake that industry observers first made about Google and Facebook. And Brian and Matthew Monahan, the 23- and 26-year-old brothers behind 4-year-old Inflection, don’t want you to feel silly years from now if their company accomplishes what it’s setting out to do: transform the public records industry and become the go-to place for people search. While you can find out plenty about people via search giants like Google and Yahoo -- and despite a succession of other sites like PeopleFinders.com and PublicRecordFinder.com that make it easier to find public records online -- the Monahan brothers say they’ve already compiled so many public records that any firm that tries to catch up now will be eating their dirt. It's a claim that Matrix Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures plainly agree with. Matrix led the company’s Series A, giving it $15.25 million, while Sutter Hill Ventures chipped in another $14.75 million. (The company isn’t disclosing its pre-money valuation, though the brothers say they are “happy with it” and that they raised as much capital as they did because they didn’t want to seek out a second round any time soon.)
