About Us

At A Glance
  • 80+ million registered users in over 200 nations
  • 44+ million unique monthly users — 58% under age 35
  • Avail in 23+ language options; #1 site for global Spanish-language community
  • Privately-held company; raised $250K to launch business, reached profitability within first year; in July 2007, secured $20M from MDV - Mohr Davidow Ventures to accelerate expansion of company size, service offering and global reach

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, hi5 is one of the world's largest social networks. Alexa® ranks hi5 as a top 20 website globally, and as the #1 social network in 26 countries across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

hi5 was designed with the global audience in mind, and is currently available in 23 language options (with more to come). Whether delivering locally relevant applications and feature translations, offering in-language customer support, or securing regional media partnerships, we strive to provide services that are inviting, useable and meaningful for people in many different countries and cultures around the world.

How the Service is Used

While circumstances and geography can separate individuals from one another, hi5 helps its members stay connected with friends, family and others that are important to them in a simple, fun and safe online environment. Through the service (which adjusts to deliver information pertinent to each user), members link to people they’ve known throughout their lives, while making and maintaining new acquaintances as well. They use hi5 to share photos, send messages, express themselves with profile pages, join discussion groups, explore music and videos, and more — making it easier to learn about what’s happening in the lives of the people they care about, regardless of where they live or work.

In supporting this valuable communication, hi5 is also committed to protecting the privacy of its members. The service offers a range of privacy settings and controls that enable members to select how they are viewed and how their information flows through the system.

The Technology Behind hi5

hi5 operates the largest PostgreSQL installation in the world across hundreds of database and storage servers. Our unique systems store billions of friend relationships and instantly make this information available. To support the network’s global reach and a breadth of third party applications, hi5 uses a combination of open source and home grown technologies to deliver a highly available, highly scalable infrastructure on economical Linux servers. hi5 has also adopted Open Social – a common set of APIs developed by Google – to support the rapid development and rollout of more social networking applications for hi5 members.

Leadership

hi5 is led by business and technology architects with extensive experience in online properties. Click here to review leadership bios.

Media Contact

415-962-7075
More Information
About Us [PDF]
Timeline of Milestones [PDF]
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