Paid Adult Social Network, Zivity Raises $7 Million

| Amit Chowdhry | Sunday, March 9th, 2008 | 604 Views

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Scott Banister and his wife, Cyan have started a social network called Zivity that promotes the uploading of tasteful pictures of women.  It’s intention is not to porn, but it is to focus on the art of the human body.  Previously, Scott Banister started a company called IronPort to prevent porn spam from entering the inboxes of corporations.  Cisco Systems bought IronPort for $830 million.  The fee to use Zivity is $10 per month.

Using Facebook and MySpace for free comes with a cost.  Most of the time, users are fed inane advertising.  Zivity doesn’t have any advertising.  “We like to think of Zivity as the HBO of the Web [1],” stated Scott referring to his site.

In August 2007, Zivity raised $1 million of seed capital from various investors around Silicon Valley.  The investors include former PayPal executives.  Jeffrey Wescostt is the CEO of Zivity.  The site was built using Ruby on Rails, Python, and PERL.  Zivity bans sex acts, naked men, and extreme closeups. 

Models have to be over 18 and photo portfolios must contain at least 15 shots.  Each user gets 5 votes per month to cast on favorite phots.  These votes turn into dollars distributed towards these artists.

TechCrunch reported today that Zivity raised an additional $7 million.  This round of funding was led by BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.  BlueRun is also an investor in Slide and Riya.  Founders Fund have previously invested in Slide, Facebook, Powerset, Geni and Quantcast. 

I applied to be a Beta tester at Zivity.  If I get approved, I’ll perform a full review of the site. 

Information Sources:
[1] Forbes

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