Nextdoor, the popular social network for neighbors, announced today that it has raised $47 million in funding from Mary Meeker’s Bond, rounding out a previously announced growth round at $170 million.
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In May, we reported that the nine-year-old company had raised $123 million at a $2.1 billion post-money valuation as part of a Series F led by Riverwood Capital. (The company said this morning the valuation remains the same). Existing backers Benchmark, Tiger Global Management and Kleiner Perkins also put money in that tranche of the round, which included “new participation” from an unnamed large global asset manager.
Today’s financing brings Nextdoor’s total raised to $455.2 million since its inception, according to its Crunchbase profile. The company was founded by Adam Ginsburg, David Wiesen, Madison Bell, Nirav Tolia, Prakash Janakiraman, and Sarah Leary.
In a world where so many people are glued to their devices, Nextdoor is a startup that has found a way to use technology to try and help people feel a sense of community. The San Francisco-based company aims to connect people who live in the same, or nearby, neighborhoods together by creating a forum for them to communicate digitally. Its presence has grown over time and currently, people in over 247,000 neighborhoods in ten countries are using the platform. (That’s a gain of 11,000 from its May figure that I reported at the time.) It has more than 300 employees globally.
In May, when I asked about financial growth metrics, a spokeswoman only told me that Nextdoor expects “revenue to double again in 2019.” The company makes money from a combination of sponsored posts as well as a real estate vertical that allows agents to brand themselves as local experts in the neighborhood.
Bond General Partner Mary Meeker joins the company’s board as part of the financing event.
“Nextdoor is built on trust – verifying each members’ name, address and neighborhood – which creates the transparency and accountability that is core to building communities,” she said in a written statement. “Nextdoor is connecting people to the information and services that matter most, and I am excited to work with this impressive team to help expand Nextdoor’s local utility as well as its growing global footprint.”
Nextdoor’s revenue growth puts it in good company; growing over 100 percent is comfortable unicorn territory. But with the public markets wobbling, recession worries mounting, and trade tensions persisting, having more capital aboard is likely a welcome insurance policy for the company against market disturbances.
Finally, the deal brings Meeker into an investment where her former employer Kleiner Perkins holds a stake. Though her exit from KPCB marked the end of an era, it’s doubtful that the older firm minds that Meeker and Bond are putting more capital into Nextdoor; after all, she’s putting more dry powder in an investment that could generate material markups and liquidity. (For more on Kleiner’s new life, head here for notes from our time with a number of its new partners.)
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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