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The people search-and-find site Reunion.com, secured $25 million from Oak Investment Partners this April, a whopping first round of institutional funding for a networking site.

But unlike many Web 2.0 sites, Reunion has been profitable since its launch in 2002 with $1.4 million of angel funding from company founder Jeffrey Tinsley, the former founder and CEO of GreatDomains.com, Richard Rosenblatt, the former chairman of MySpace.com and Andy Mazzarella, current CEO of eForce Media.

Tinsley's and Reunion's success is due, in part, to a revenue model that places paid-for services on par with advertising.

Also, the site's idea – that most everyone has lost touch with someone they would like to find again – targets a broad market with purchasing power.

"We are fortunate to provide a service that appeals to this older audience, [who are] more than 60 percent female and [they] are the ones making buying decisions for the home, they have credit cards, they are interested in the service and have a willingness to pay," for them, Tinsley said.

More than 90 percent of the site's audience are adults over the age of 25 – the post-Facebook crowd – and many are drawn to the site to search for someone they lost touch with such as a best friend, co-worker, neighbor or former high school sweetheart.

Reunion searches public records, personal profile data sets and its own database, of over 28 million records, Tinsley said, to find names matching the special someone that is being searched for.

"It's a different service offering versus a lot of these other social networking [sites], it's not about kids flirting on the site, trying to discover who they are," he said. "It's an audience of older people, that are busy, they have jobs but they care about their friends, family and their relationships and they want an easier way to stay connected that saves them time."

At the first, the site searches millions, if not billions of records to find the new user's old friend. Next, add-on services keep the user coming back and updating their Reunion community on the big events in their lives such as weddings, births and job changes. (Unlike other social sites, it is not expected that a Reunion member would update their profile, blog or photos every day, much less every hour.)

The site's initial search service is free. Services such as finding out who is searching for you, emailing other members and receiving public record documents are for premium members only. The cost for membership is $60 a year, $96 for two years or $120 for three years.

"From day one we believed in a balanced business model," Tinsley said. Instead of a revenue model solely based on advertising, "we actually have services that people are willing to pay for on a daily basis," he said.

Reunion started with the acquisition of two social networks that were competitors to Classmates.com. The concepts of the sites were broadened and a name with more flexibility chosen.

After five years of increasing revenue with no capital, Tinsley and his investors decided it was time to accept funding.

"We've been able to grow 100 percent a year by making smart decisions and building up this service. We could have continued to grow at that pace, without capital, but now we realized the time is now to take this great service out to the mass market," he said. "Growing the business 100 percent a year, though we could do it, was not our interest anymore. It's time to reach the mass market and create something really big here."