Vingle (social network)

Founding

The company was launched on October 21, 2011, by Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon, creators of Viki, which they sold for $200 million. In 2012 Vingle received $1.5 million in Series A funding from K Cube Ventures. The co-founders had also invested $1 million in the company, and in its first four months, Vingle had about 600,000 unique monthly visitors. On Viki users would translate and subtitle television shows or movies, so Ho and Moon started Vingle to grow the number of interest groups and crowdsourcing projects that users could pursue on the site.

Overview

The social network was initially based on a South Korean website, but in 2014 moved to an iOS and Android app. That year the network had 2.3 million users and 100 million monthly page views across about three thousand interest focused communities. The app received 1.4 million downloads in its first year, and Vingle next began to expand into Japan and the United States. By late 2014, Vingle had four million monthly visitors from 105 countries, with content in twenty-six different languages. As of 2015, the company was valued at $1 billion. Vingle has offices in Seoul, Tokyo, and Silicon Valley.

Use

Vingle requires users to sign up to access its communities, either through a user account or via another social media account. Once on the site, users record their personal interests and begin to use the site’s collection tool to follow other users interested in the same topics. Users can publish their own posts called “cards”, which can contain video, images, and text.