Strategic Sourcing Europe

Professional social network LinkedIn has raised $12.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund, early this week. ” The company, which is profitable since March 2006, has raised $13.4 million in two previous rounds of financing, bringing the total to more than $26 million. The company generated $10 million-ish in revenue in 2006, and says they’ll do substantially more than that in 2007. LinkedIn has 70 employees, up from 45 a year ago. They claim 9 million worldwide users, and are adding 100,000 or so new users per week. ” Source: Techcrunch (which was even spreading the news one day earlier). The company plans to use the funds to expand further into Europe and other markets. Source: DigitalMediaWire

I don’t know what you think, but I do believe personally that this kind of online tools designed for professional will continue to expand and might probably replace our old-paper-based ‘yellow pages’ directories. One can even anticipate that linkedIn (US), Viadeo (FR), Xing (GE, but involving 13 nationalities as Eutilia did), well, the potential winners on this B2B social network war, will be integrated with e-Sourcing or e-Procurement tools to tap the benefits of synergies and add mutual value to each other system.