Consider it the Facebook of the leaf-blower set.
While the rest of us have been madly tweeting our lives away, San Francisco-based startup Nextdoor has quietly built a sprawling network of 53,000 microcommunities across the United States, each limited to a specific geographical area whose residents must first verify they actually live there to join.
Billing itself as “The Private Social Network for Your Neighborhood,” the service has been the envy of large Internet companies clamoring to get a piece of the local-service and retail-advertising markets just sitting there in America’s neighborhoods, waiting to be plucked.
On Wednesday, Nextdoor is expected to announce a bit of its plucking. As a post in the New York Times put it:
The company will announce on Wednesday that it has raised $110 million in venture capital from investors like Redpoint Ventures and Insight Venture Partners. The new investment values the three-and-a-half-year-old start-up at about $1.1 billion, putting the company among the sharply rising number of tech start-ups with 10-figure valuations.
In other words: Move over Eventbrite, Credit Karma and Tango… there’s a new very valuable dog in town.
Investors like Redpoint and Insight Venture see a goldmine in the modern-day digital Mayberry, where social buzz among chatty and engaged next-door neighbors can create a strong emotional web and, more importantly, an online platform that its users can trust.
And, as Nextdoor’s CEO Nirav Tolia put it in an interview:
“Building community is really, really hard. Trust is essential, and it has to be authentic.”
According to the Times, “The investors seem to believe that there is more money to be had in small — neighborhood-size — communities. Many Internet companies, including AOL, Google and Foursquare, have already homed in on this market, with mixed success. Mr. Tolia and Sarah Leary, the founders of Nextdoor, believe they have found the answer. In short, it is all about community.
Now Nextdoor will have a heck of a lot more money to weave a network that can both strengthen and exploit that sense of community.
Might Andy Griffith be rolling in his grave?
Credit: Nextdoor.com
