investment

www.xihalife.com a finnish fast-growing startup with a bit of an unusual background has announced that they have closed a significant financing round with a chinese investor.

I am involved in Xiha as an advisor and a small owner.

Xiha is a multilingual social network that's available in over 40 languages and has more than 800 thousand (close to 1M) uniques a month from over 200 countries in the world. The company and the site is founded by finnish-chinese couple with an impressive background in the gaming industry.

With the investment Xiha is capable of hiring a few new entire teams to work on the service, and to open up offices in Zürich, the US and in China.

The big growth opportunity lies in multilingual people that are pretty much all over the map globally; in the US alone there's about 37 million people who are immigrants and know at least a second language. Many people are pretty fed up being forced to have their social networks in one language only. I personally have this problem in Facebook; mixing together english-only friends with my finnish-only friends doesn't quite work all that well, and Xiha hits the mark in this particular usecase with laser precision. In this blog post I talked about my first company Taika, and back in 2000 we solved a social networking presence/microblogging problem that the Facebooks of today have still not really solved; we came up with a simple usable and fast way to send different status messages and microblog entries to different contact groups simultaneously. Xiha totally solves this from the language point of view. Get in there, register and try it out for yourself.

CC Attribution: Vanessa Pike-Russel@Flickr

What's really impressive is that Xiha's rate of unique user growth is over 20% a month; with kind of unusual markets like Turkey, China, Brazil, and France. Xiha is expected to reach over 1M uniques by the end of the year, and keep on growing strong after that. The company was founded only last year - so it's gone from zero to 100 pretty quick.

Here's Xiha's founder on Xihalife.com. And this would be me in there as well.

I see Xiha as being fresh, unique and really in a speed-train-like growth towards possibly becoming a really well known success case. Xiha's primary revenue model is digital content; like casual games, etc. There's more than a 1000 PC and MAC games available.

Want to learn something about making successful social networks? Register to Xiha and go for the "gold member challenge", found here:
http://en.xihalife.com/gold/ -that's something that sort of reveals the gaming background of the founder. It's a challenge that motivates the user to go through a series of fun tasks (or "quests" as a World of Warcraft player would call them, right?) and the end reward is a gold member status. Works like a charm - go try it out and take notes.