The “local space” has long held sway over the imagination of entrepreneurs, who have produced everything from travel apps to city guides, neighborhood news sites and event planners in pursuit of local dollars. But local is a tough nut to crack, with many high-profile companies stumbling along the way, including EveryBlock, Patch and YardSellr to name a few.
Nextdoor is one of a handful of companies that has managed to thrive in the local market, and a growing list of investors are betting that the “Facebook for your neighborhood” could be the next big social network.
With 22,500 neighborhoods (and one-in-seven in the U.S.) now using Nextdoor to create private websites where locals can ask questions, get to know one another and exchange advice and recommendations, Nextdoor is ready to go international. To do so, the startup has secured a whopping $60 million round in Series C financing from veteran investors, including John Doerr and Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Lee Fixel of Tiger Global Management.
The round, which brings the startup’s funding to over $100 million, also includes Comcast Ventures, as well as Nextdoor’s previous investors, Benchmark, Greylock Partners, and Shasta Ventures.
Now two years from lauch, Nextdoor has seen its customer base increase by 400 percent over the last twelve months, CEO and founder Nirav Tolia tells us. With big names like eBay, Facebook, Google and craigslist all playing in the potentially winner-takes-all social networking space, Nextdoor has managed to find an audience by focusing on becoming a support group for your local neighborhood.
“We believe that Nextdoor has the opportunity to be for our local life what Facebook is for our social life and what LinkedIn is for our professional life,” Tolia says. With its 400 percent growth over the last year to 22,500 neighborhoods, the startup is now growing at a similar rate to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when they were at a similar point in their development. While the CEO declined to share particulars, he says that the startup’s new round pegs it a fairly similar valuation to the social networking giants – not quite at $1 billion, but “healthy.”
Since the launch of v2.0 in February, the local social network has been focused on increasing the opportunities for engagement by allowing users to view and post messages with closely bordering neighborhoods, for example. Initially, users could only post messages and share information about their own local hood on Nextdoor, but the startup is hoping that, by taking a few measured steps to expand its scope, it can help neighbors, say, find that missing cat that wandered from one neighborhood into the next. Being able to see those limited updates from nearby locations makes sense, and has added to Nextdoor’s utility.
The network is also providing value by becoming a communication network for local crime and safety monitoring – now one of Nextdoor’s most popular use cases. In February, for example, crime and safety-related posts accounted for 20 percent of the network’s messages, and this remains true today, the CEO says. As Alexia pointed out in her coverage of Nextdoor back in March, today Nextdoor has begun to act like a modern, web and mobile-friendly version of your local “Neighborhood Watch.”
Over time, crime and safety channels have grown in importance within the community to the point that Tolia now considers Nextdoor’s “Neighborhood Watch” functionality to be equivalent in value to what photos have been for Facebook over the years. “They’re completely irreplaceable.
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