Well, it's not strictly a startup. Viadeo started life in France, as a social networking service for businesses, but it's only recently opened a dedicated UK office to drive membership over here.
The obvious comparisons are with LinkedIn and Xing, although as UK country manager Peter Cunningham told me, Viadeo thinks there's more to its service than a pure address book and recruiting tool. It's certainly grown fast.
"It started off as a private online business tool for 200 French companies, and just mushroomed from there," he says. "Since they made it public and open two years ago, it's grown to over one million members, with 50 staff working to run it."
Viadeo has the standard social networking features, such as profiles, photos, and the ability to invite contacts and build a network around it. But Cunningham says its USP is its 'hubs' – consisting of forums, blogs and RSS feeds around specific subjects or job types.
"It might be alumni of a certain business school, people who are management accountants or freelancers, or even people into windsurfing, French wine, or who have an interest in Voice over IP," he says.
People will still be tempted to compare Viadeo with LinkedIn, especially if they're already signed up to the latter. Cunningham admits to being a member of the latter site himself, which he likes, but still has some fairly bullish words on its limitations.
"It's essentially a job board and address book," he says. "They claim they have nine million users, and that 20-30% of those are regular users, but they define that as someone who uses it every three months. We do sell services to recruiters, but we're not a job board."
Cunningham says Viadeo is strongly focused on not just porting what's worked in France to the UK, but instead creating a community that serves UK business users. He says it's too early to get a clear view of how they'll differ from French users, though. Viadeo has already signed up almost 10,000 people here, although many of those are French ex-pats.
"We're not a technology-led company, although we are going to add things like chat, Voice over IP and other features," says Cunningham. "But it's a market-driven business, so that will dictate how the service evolves."
Building Viadeo's community in the UK will be partly based on word-of-mouth. In France, apparently people tend to sign up after they've received a certain number of invitations from friends – 4-5 usually. However, there will be other forms of marketing in the UK eventually, and Viadeo is already working with PR firm Brands 2 Life to raise awareness.
The inclusion of non-work-related hubs is interesting. Is it important to be able to network with business contacts around, say, wine or sport? Cunningham says yes.
"There's a large social side of networking, whether it's around sports, quizzes or whatever. The excuse is to network and meet potential clients, but the return on investment is quite low. You might play sport against someone, have a quick drink and maybe talk to a couple of people. But if you have a hub linking the people in that sports league online, you might be able to find the person you didn't speak to that night, but would actually like to. It makes that offline networking much more productive."
Unwanted contacts could be an issue for this kind of business social network, but Viadeo has strict controls in place to spot spam and kick people out who abuse the service. There are two membership levels: Basic and Premium, with the latter allowing you to request direct introductions from other users, without having to go through intermediaries.
"70% of our services are free, including the hubs, job offers, classified advertisements and all the profile features," says Cunningham. "Also, we're giving away free months of Premium access every time you invite five people who sign up, and if you forward a job offer onto someone and they accept it, everyone in the chain gets 12 months free."
Viadeo isn't selling advertising space on the site at the moment, in an effort to keep it clean. The company is reviewing that policy however, and undertaking research to see if it would annoy users to have ads on the site.
I think Viadeo's big challenge in the UK will be one of communicating its unique features, ensuring people who have already signed up to LinkedIn don't just assume it's a me-too service.
I also wonder if some of the more high-powered business types will spare the time to get involved in the Hubs and interact with other users, but time will tell on that score. For now, it's certainly a polished service with bags of potential – and a proven pedigree in France.