LinkedIn Receives $13 Million Infusion

The VC funding blitz of 2006 looks like it’s carrying over into ’07 quite smoothly. LinkedIn just announced it received just shy of $13 million from several investors, most notably Bessemer and the European Founders Fund. The latest infusion to the “social network for professionals” follows a total of $13.4 million invested in the company since its start, and because the LinkedIn stated that it has been profitable since March of 2006, few see this motion as a wasted effort.

LinkedIn has borne the brunt of a large amount of criticism in the past pertaining to privacy issues. A great deal of spam was able to get through to users unrequested, and some alleged that LinkedIn had ignored or abetted the unsolicited activity because it had financial incentive to do so. While bad blood still exists between the company and some outspoken internet “celebrities”, namely several regular guests of Leo Laporte’s on TWiT (This Week in Tech), a weekly podcast that explores – well, I’m sure you can figure that one out.

Nowadays it appears LinkedIn has gotten quite large, as it is one of the most well-known sites that advocates and allows networking between people in a vast array of industries. I like to think of LinkedIn as a great big shared Rolodex. You sign up, you add a colleague, friend, or family member to your list, and you are then able to view his or her list, and so on and so forth. Some mistake it for a job market. It’s more a convenient place to find people you need or may want to speak with; if a business deal or a job offer so happens to come out of a correspondence on LinkedIn, that is purely a byproduct of the site’s main mission.

As I stated earlier, LinkedIn has been a profitable entity since March of ’06, so it is doing well, and a recent addition to the site, LinkedIn Answers, is, as the company says itself, one of its most popular features. LinkedIn Answers gives one the option to ask questions in a message board-type format. Your circle of contacts can be the pool from which answers to your questions arrive, but you may also expand your search to encompass the entire breadth of LinkedIn’s community. Some members are “Experts”, a group of people which have been rated as such by those posing the questions or others chiming in and/or browsing LinkedIn Answers.

Marketing itself as the place to go for business professionals to find others in their field or in separate industries, LinkedIn is destined to grow, but anyone has yet to postulate what the critical mass of the site might be, whether it’s bound to meet or exceed the figure, or whether it plans to keep its feet firmly planted on the ground. As long as LinkedIn serves a desired purpose for enough people, its viability shouldn’t even be a topic for discussion. It could very well get carried away and lose touch with its core clientele, but such a scenario is difficult to foresee.

LinkedIn clearly has the makeup of a social network, but it is one that gets plenty of exposure in today’s workplace. Furthermore, the “ship” has few leaks, so if it moves as its market moves, we’ll see it bear increasing merit and value in our everyday lives. Whether it continues as an independent operation or gets a knock at the door by the likes of Microsoft or SAP is anyone’s guess at this point. But for sure, this month’s $13 million infusion will not be a bad expense made by the heads at Bessemer and the European Founders Fund.