Meetup Gets Investment

The social networking website that showed us how to bridge the virtual world with the real world has taken some additional funding from some heavy hitters including ebay. I believe ebay also has an interest in Mollyguard, an event registration service that exclusively uses paypal. This is an interesting move from ebay. Are they eyeing up the event business?Via Paidcontent.org:
Meetup.com board member Pierre Omidyar first invested in the social networking site in 2003; now eBay, the company he founded and still chairs, and his Omidyar Network are among the five investors that just acquired 10 percent of the equity in Meetup.com. The other investors are also on or represented on the Meetup board: Esther dyson, former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, Allen & Co., and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Bradley represents Allen & Co. on the board.
No official details about how much equity each investor acquired or how much they paid, although BusinessWeek.com pegs it as less than $10 million — which could be anything. Meetup co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman says the funding will go to a new advertising campaign including posters on New York subways and to a series of leadership conferences.
~admin