Social media company Nextdoor agreed yesterday to acquire Streetlife, a UK-based social media platform backed by media group Archant, for an amount reported by TechCrunch to be less than £10m ($12.5m) in cash.
Streetlife operates a social media platform based on the location if its users’ homes. Users sign up with their address and are instantly linked to neighbours, allowing them to share and exchange information, advice or local plans. It claims to have 1.5 million members.
The deal will give Nextdoor, which operates a similar service spanning 125,000 neighbourhoods in the US, a firm route into Europe following its February 2016 launch in the Netherlands.
Streetlife’s users and data will not be automatically carried over to Nextdoor but the platform will be shut down later this month and its users invited to sign up to the latter’s service.
Nextdoor chief executive Nirav Tolia said: “Streetlife has built a wonderful, engaged community of neighbours, and we are excited to welcome them to Nextdoor.
“Ultimately, this deal will help deliver on our mission to create the most useful neighbourhood network in the UK – one that can be used by every neighbour, in every neighbourhood, every day.”
Archant participated in a £600,000 round for Streetlife in 2013 through its Archant Digital Ventures unit, investing alongside financial services provider Shohet & Cie and taking the company’s overall funding to £1.4m.
Streetlife, which was also backed by Social Discovery Ventures, had pledged to raise another £3m but although that funding is listed on deals database CrunchBase, the company did not officially disclose the additional funding.