Memorial site and service 1000Memories.com announces today that it has closed a $2.5 million Series A round of funding. The startup’s list of investors is an impressive one, including Greylock Partners, Paul Buchheit, Keith Rabois, Ron Conway, Caterina Fake, Mike Maples, Chris Sacca, among others.
1000Memories is a website where friends and family can come together to remember someone who has passed. 1000Memories aims to create a permanent online place where people can come, share their stories, and remember the lives of their loved ones.
1000Memories offers what we’ve called “Obituary 2.0”, a recognition that the Web has changed and can change the way in which we memorialize loved ones. You can create a 1000Memories site for someone – it’s free – and then invite friends and family to join and to participate in what the company calls a “Wikipedia-like approach” to the obituary.
If you’ve lost a loved one, you know what a horrific process dealing with things like obituaries can be. If you’ve had to negotiate death and social networks, you understand how inadequate many of the tools for talking and sharing can be. 1000Memories co-founders – Rudy Adler, Jonathan Good, and Brett Huneycutt – all experienced a loss. Their stories underwrite much of their mission, so far in the company’s history they approach all of this with incredible respect and support.
The investment announcement is a testament to that. So, much more powerfully you might argue, is the memorial that recently took shape on the site in honor of the protestors who died during the recent protests in Egypt. “Egypt remembers“, 1000Memories’ first group site, was started when Toronto entrepreneur and Egyptian ex-pat Mahmoud Hashim contacted 1000Memories, saying he thought the site would be a good way to make sure those who lost their lives had an online monument, of sorts, in honor of their sacrifice. Students, translators, doctors, writers – the names have been pulled from a Google Doc. As friends and family have come forward, photos have been added and full, individual profiles have been updated for the many of the 160-some-odd names.
