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WeeWorld: $15.5M Allowance

WeeWorld received $15.5 million in a second round of funding from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, enabling it to grow its digital identity business internationally. CEO Celia Francis said the London-based firm will use the funds to expand its presence in the United States, support further advertising and sponsorship deals, and achieve what Ms. Francis jokingly refers to as “WeeWorld domination.” The company is not yet profitable. The financing round follows an initial round of investment made by Benchmark in March 2005. About 9 million users have already created “WeeMees”—digital characters that represent the user’s identity online and on mobile devices—and the company says 500,000 users join monthly. The characters can be used in emails, blogs, instant messaging applications, and cell phones. WeeMees can also link up and find other WeeMees with similar interests. Users now pay $2 to create a WeeMee, as well as pay for additional updates to their character via a mobile phone.

With WeeWorld increasingly focusing on advertising and sponsorship deals, however, Ms. Francis said the company would soon give users more flexibility to update their characters without paying additional fees. WeeWorld also announced an expanded deal with Microsoft that allows users to build a WeeMee via MSN Messenger. The feature has been added to MSN in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, joining Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. As WeeWorld expands, the company needs to pay attention to increasingly localized content, noted Ms. Francis. Young people in different countries vary in the way they like their characters to look and act. “You have to be quite an anthropologist,” she said.