San Francisco-headquartered Nextdoor is set to purchase the “assets” of UK-based local social network Streetlife, in a deal dubbed a “multi-million-pound” acquisition.
Further details of the deal are yet to be released, but what is known as of now is that Streetlife’s 1.5 million registered users will be invited to sign up to Nextdoor’s U.K. version, which has been recently launched before Streetlife itself closes down. Both companies have given the assurance that no member data will be transferred without the Streetlife member giving his or her explicit approval.
According to TechCrunch, the acquisition is a cash-based one for less than £10 million, with employees from Streetlife not transferring to Nextdoor as part of the deal. Streetlife founder Matthew Boyes assured, however, that the staff is being taken care of as far as the sale is concerned.
According to CrunchBase, Streetlife had raised around $5 million. Its backers include Archant Digital Ventures (the incubator and investment arm of regional U.K. media company Archant), Shohet & Cie, and SDVentures, amongst others. Going by the startup’s most recent regulatory filing, it had almost 90 shareholders.
Nextdoor members have quickly established thousands of online communities in towns and cities across the country, including over 40% of London neighbourhoods. Before today’s announcement, Nextdoor was already growing ten times more quickly in the U.K. than when the company launched in the United States.
When asked if Nextdoor entering the U.K. just four months ago would have made it more difficult for Streetlife to raise another funding round, Boyes said that it wasn’t so, and instead argued that the very fact that Nextdoor existed, although based in the US, had always helped validate the startup’s existence amongst prospective investors.
However, Nextdoor was given a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion by investors in 2015, making it another ‘unicorn’, something that European VCs felt quite jittery about in relation to Streetlife’s own fate. The sale of its assets now settles that issue.
