Social Yearbook Company, TreeRing, Raises $3.6 Million in Series
A Funding
With 3.3 Million Photos Shared and 1,200 customers and growing,
TreeRing is changing the way students capture and share their memories.
San Mateo, CA, September
25, 2012
– TreeRing, the world’s first social yearbook company, today announced it has closed
a $3.6 million investment led by their angel funder Mike McCue (CEO of
Flipboard), Second Ave Partners and Cedar Grove Investments. Additionally, several angel investors
participated in the round, most notably the Expedia and Zillow Founder, Rich
Barton.
As
another school year starts and students set out to create another year of
memories, one thing is clear: traditional yearbooks are a thing of the past. Since
launching in 2010, schools have been changing the way they are capturing their
memories. TreeRing’s new model allows yearbooks
to be built online through their online social network and printed on demand
with personalized pages for each student.
The company now has over 1,200 schools across 49 states and Canada. Additionally, TreeRing has printed more than
125,000 yearbooks, and users are sharing more than 3.3M photos.
With
this funding, TreeRing will continue to expand its team and grow its marketing
across the country. TreeRing has
recently expanded its platform to allow students, parents, and teachers to not
only share photos and page content with each other, but students can also sign
one another’s yearbooks, share memories, and send each other graphic based
messages, which TreeRing has dubbed “book bling.”
“TreeRing
has ingeniously combined the new capabilities of print, social, and design
technologies. Not only does this change
the American yearbook forever, but this will change how students capture their
memories and remember their youth in years to come,” said Mike McCue, CEO of
Flipboard.
“We’ve
brought the $5 billion custom memory book industry to the $2 billion yearbook
industry and glued them together with the power of online social networks. Most
importantly we are allowing kids to capture and share their memories in a much
more meaningful way and saving schools money while doing it,” according to TreeRing
CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Greco.
TreeRing
also has overturned the traditional pricing model of the yearbook industry,
which usually charges schools advance deposits, makes them guarantee a certain
number of sales, and puts schools in the business of collecting payment from
families. TreeRing offers its tool at
zero cost to schools, and families purchase books directly online, taking
schools out of the middleman role and ensuring that no one has to juggle excess
yearbook inventory at the end of the school year. That saves schools time, space, as well as
paper waste.
Through
a partnership with the nonprofit organization, Trees for the Future, TreeRing
also plants a tree for each yearbook that is purchased. And schools have the option of tacking a
fundraiser premium onto their yearbook price, allowing them to raise a couple
of dollars per book purchased without any additional work, serving as an easy
and effective fundraising tool at a time when schools are increasingly crunched
for funding. This past year alone TreeRing
schools raised over $130K.
