Nuzzel is a social news aggregator that launched version 2.0 of its website and app, billed as “Nuzzel for Everyone.” The revamp removes the requirement for a Twitter login while preserving the traditional personalized feed for loyal users. New features include a Discover section with recommended feeds (some user-created, some by Nuzzel), the ability to save favorite feeds, and search across feeds and stories. The company has been moving toward topical feeds to serve users who want to follow subjects rather than specific Twitter accounts, and to reach people not on Twitter. CEO Jonathan Abrams, also the founder of Friendster, said the company sees value in adding investors with media and news connections as well as Silicon Valley backers. Financially, Nuzzel announced $1.7M in additional funding alongside the product relaunch. Abrams noted some existing investors reinvested and that media-industry investors in the round wrote smaller checks than Silicon Valley investors. Nuzzel is a social news startup led by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams that makes it easy to see news stories most-shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. The product lets users expand to headlines shared by friends of friends or view individual users' news feeds; it recently launched an iPhone app that was featured in Apple’s App Store and added news-alerts for stories tweeted by many friends. The company is a four-person team and plans to hire three more engineers with the new funding. Nuzzel raised a second seed of $1.7M after having spent about half of its original $1.7M seed; the main purpose of the new funding is to hire engineers. Investors in the round include Chris Sacca and Matt Mazzeo (Lowercase Capital), Hunter Walk and Satya Patel (Homebrew), Ullas Naik (Streamlined Ventures), DG (Digital Garage) Incubation, WiL (World Innovation Lab), DeNA, MOL, and a group of angel investors. Several of the new backers were active Nuzzel users prior to investing, and previous backers also participated in the round. Nuzzel aggregates relevant news stories from users’ feeds and delivers them on a dashboard and via email. It includes a “news you may have missed” section that surfaces items shared by an extended network across topics. The site is currently in beta and people can sign in via Twitter. Founded in 2012 by Jonathan Abrams (cofounder of Friendster) and based in San Francisco, Nuzzel plans to use new funding to develop the service and release an iOS app. The company has raised $1.7M in funding to support development.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2015