Nextdoor, with Comcast Ventures as one of its investors, partners with Philly, while EveryBlock expands to new cities

Tom Paine

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Nextdoor, the localized bulletin board service that announced partnering with Philadelphia last week, has huge ambitions.

In late 2013, it raised $60 million from John Doerr, Tiger Global and others to bring its total funding to over $100 million at a probable valuation of over $500 million. Another investor in that round was Comcast Ventures.

I don't see anything in the announcement that suggests that Nextdoor is offering Philadelphia something unique to that service that couldn't be found in other communities it is available in around the country. It is essentially a bulletin
board that can create separate communities for neighborhoods with cities or counties, and group messages by various topics within those communities. The feature it did add in September that may be particularly helpful to Philadelphia is Nextdoor for Public Agencies. This allows government agencies to communicate with residents on Nextdoor targeted to selected neighborhoods. Before this, residents could only communicate with other verified residents in a neighborhood.

No money is being exchanged in either direction, Technical.ly Philly reported, citing a City spokesperson.

Meanwhile, Comcast has expanded its back from the dead, wholely-owned EveryBlock to Houston, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia, all cities served by Comcast Cable. Though different in stylistics, both services are trying to serve the same function towards the same basic goal - generating local revenue, though there doesn't seem to be too much of that yet. From what I've seen so far, EveryBlock seems to be preseeded with more local information, while Nextdoor is basically just a bulletin board, though that may not be true everywhere.

That Comcast owns Everyblock while Comcast Ventures has a stake in Nextdoor is not surprising. Comcast Ventures has its own investment strategy, though there might be a chance that the two might fit together in some manner down the road.

@phillytechnews @PhiladelphiaGov We need to work with every channel that helps us connect people and neighborhoods to one another

— Adel Ebeid (@adelebeid) December 17, 2014

Interestingly, Nextdoor's CEO and co-founder is a Philly native, Nirav Tolia, though he grew up mostly in Odessa (Friday Night Lights) Texas. From there he headed to Stannford and a somewhat controversial but successful Silicon Valley career.