A popular website that helps entrepreneurs find co-founders and advisers just inked a deal of its own.
San Francisco-based FounderDating has agreed to be sold to New York-based startup investment platform Onevest for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced today. The site will now be housed under Onevest’s own founder matchmaking platform, CoFoundersLab.
The acquisition will create one of the largest networks of entrepreneurs and advisers, says Onevest co-founder and executive chairman Alejandro Cremades. “We’re popping champagne bottles right now,” he adds.
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Cremades and fellow co-founder Tanya Prive certainly have a few reasons to celebrate: Onevest absorbed its top competitor and nearly tripled its user base to a total of 250,000 of founders in its network.
Perhaps even more important is that the company now owns FounderDating’s “Discuss” community, a forum for entrepreneurs to ask questions and get advice from other entrepreneurs. Officially launched in February of 2015, FounderDating: Discuss boasts a 95% response rate with most questions averaging three to four responses within hours of posting. Entrepreneurs use the feature to ask broad questions such as, “How do founders become more investment-ready?” And more narrow ones like, “Any recommendations for setting up a legal entity in Romania?”
Acquiring this highly-engaged FounderDating community of users could prove crucial to Onevest’s future growth. This move will help Onevest complete its “entrepreneurial ecosystem” by funneling newly acquired users from the CoFoundersLab networking platform to its 1000 Angels fundraising arm.
FounderDating was launched in 2012 by Jessica Alter, who will stay on as an adviser after the merger. “We’re excited for this next chapter and building a full-service network to help the exploding entrepreneurial ecosystem,” she said in a statement announcing the news. Onevest will be bringing on only some of FounderDating’s existing staff members as part of the acquisition — the company’s technical team and its managing directors. And this isn’t the first time Onevest has bought out a competitor — it has also acquired entrepreneur networking sites TechCoFounder.com, FounderMatchup.com, and Bizpora in the last four years.
In addition to the acquisition, Onevest also announced the recent launch of its CoFoundersLab Learning Center. The education platform features online classes, coaching sessions and Q&As on topics such as launching a business and raising capital.