Creator of tween social network nabs Disney VC investment

Industrious Kid, creator of tween social-networking site Imbee.com, has attracted an investment from Steamboat Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Walt Disney Company. According to Industrious Kid co-founder Tim Donovan, the company quietly raised about $2.5 million from Steamboat Ventures late last year, in its first Series A round of funding.

Industrious Kid was launched in early 2006 with $6 million in private funding from co-founder Jeannette Symons, among others. (Symons sold telecom-Internet networking firm Ascend Communications to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion.)

With the Imbee investment, Disney (a la Steamboat Ventures) is placing a wider bet on kids' sites online, and in particular, social networks for the younger set. To be sure, already runs the most popular collection of kid-oriented sites online, including the character-driven Toontown and the virtual game Virtual Magic Kingdom. According to researcher ComScore Networks, Disney Online drew about 25 million unique visitors in January. In comparison, Nickelodeon's kids sites drew just more than 11 million unique visitors in the same period.

But most of those Disney and Nickelodeon sites don't let kids do what their older brothers and sisters are doing on Myspace.com and other social networks, which is blogging, downloading songs, sharing photos and watching music videos. Imbee, which launched last summer and is still in beta, boasts a "secure" network that lets kids do most of those activities--if not all of them now, it will offer them soon--in a private community, away from potential predators.

In April, Imbee plans to take the wraps off a redesigned site, which will let kids watch music videos, among other new features. Through its partnership with Steamboat Ventures, Imbee has teamed up with the Disney division Hollywood Records so that it will be able to offer song downloads to its membership of kids ages 8 to 14.

According to Donovan, Imbee has attracted nearly 25,000 active members since its launch. (Comscore did not rank Imbee among its top kid-entertainment sites in January.) This year, the company plans to use the Steamboat investment to market itself widely to teachers and community groups to expand its business, Donovan said.

"Tweens are really a new consumer group that are demanding a slice of the Internet of their own," Donovan said. "We fill that gap between the kid-oriented destinations of Nickelodeon and the older kids' destinations like MySpace."