Pearltrees

Development of Pearltrees began in 2007.

An alpha was launched in March 2009 and made its first significant public appearance (in open beta) at LeWeb in December 2009.

CEO and Founder Patrice Lamothe laid out the rationalization for this company in his blog post, "The Web's Third Frontier", where he proposed that the next logical phase of the Internet was the democratization of the organization of the web, after the successive events of the access to content and the democratization of content creation.

At the 2010 Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Pearltrees introduced the ability to "super-embed" a pearltree into another website. Pearltrees embedded in other sites are updated dynamically, whenever the original pearltree changes on the Pearltrees website.

In December 2010, Pearltrees made their initial foray into collaborative curation with the launch of a new "team" feature. The team feature lets users of the product ask to team-up on pearltrees that have already been curated by other users. Once added to a team, these additional curators can then add, remove and reorganize the content of that and any sub-pearltrees, and can add new members to the team.

In October 2011, Pearltrees introduced the app for iPad. The product was well received by a number of technology bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Martin Bryant of TheNextWeb As of May 2012, Pearltrees for iPad had maintained an overall 4.5 star rating in Apple's iPad App Store.

In July 2012, Pearltrees launched their iPhone app. Like its predecessor product for the iPad, the app was well received by the media and also received praise from users. As a result, the application enjoyed a 4.5 star rating in Apple's App Store. In addition to curating links, Pearltrees 0.9.3 version also let contributors add photos and notes to their accounts. The product also featured an "offline mode" that supported the browsing of all collected content, whether the phone was connected to a network or not.

On October 31, 2012, Pearltrees simultaneously launched a 1.0 version and a premium membership product called Pearltrees Premium. The 1.0 version of Pearltrees featured several upgrades to the web interface, most visibly to the way content was displayed; a new format the company called "the big pearl window". Better congruence of the application across platforms is another stated improvement of the Pearltrees 1.0 experience. The launch of Pearltrees Premium was the company's first effort to monetize their product. Premium account users can keep all or a portion of an account completely private, or share it only with a few selected collaborators. Premium accounts can also be protected with a PIN on iOS devices.

Pearltree secured $12.2 million in angel and venture funding in 4 separate rounds:

The company received an initial one million Euro investment from friends, family and angel investors in June 2008. This was followed by a second, larger angel round of €1.5M in June 2009. The company secured an additional €1.3M in angel funding in June 2010 and raised a substantial A-round of $6.6 million (USD) in January 2012.

Investors

The company has generally revealed little about its sources of funding and has never sought or received investment from typical venture funds or any US investors. To date, only two investors or investment groups have been named as having contributed capital to the startup, Pierre Kosciusko Morizet and Group Accueil.

Awards

In 2010 Pearltrees was one of six companies to participate in the Web 2.0 Expo Launchpad competition. The company was also called "A Leap Forward" by OSEO.