Why should Kevin Bacon have all the fun?. 7 degrees raised $6.8 Million dollars in a second round of funding from Rho Ventures, vSpring Capital and Parkview Ventures. 7 degrees initially raised $1.2 Million of seed money from the same Venture Capital minus Rho Ventures in 2007. The startup’s flagship application is PeopleMaps, a business application that allows professionals to see how they are connected to any other person or company. PeopleMaps searches personal and various available public data sources (like linkedIn, facebook, Zoominfo etc..) to show the best Connection Paths to any person or any company. The PeopleMaps Professional Edition integrates into Salesforce.com to automate relationship selling and help accelerate sales.
The goal is for a business to make a warm introduction to a contact rather than the dreaded cold-call. Knowing how many degrees you business product or service is from closing a sale is critical and what better way than a visual representation via a flow-chart. PeopleMaps uses a point based system for rating connections and will likely develop other uses for this technology as social graph data becomes more popular (and profitable). Look for similar technology coming from Facebook in the future.
