Nextdoor acquires Neighborland
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been acquired by Nextdoor. Over the past few months, we have been exploring a path to integrate our visions for civic engagement. As we learned more from Nextdoor’s new leadership team, it became clear that there was a timely and strategic opportunity for us to continue our mission on a more impactful, global scale leading their Public Agency team.
Everyone who has contributed to the Neighborland journey over the last decade knows how aligned our vision has been with the promise of Nextdoor. Together, we will help public agencies build stronger communities, and cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.
As you might imagine, the past six weeks have been an unprecedented time for Nextdoor. Our Public Agency team is providing a platform and technical assistance for thousands of local governments, over 25 state governments, and the CDC and WHO on their COVID-19 crisis response communications. We have announced new partnerships with governors across the U.S. including Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and John Bel Edwards; mayors across the world including Muriel Bowser, Lori Lightfoot, and Sadiq Khan; and national governments and NGOs in Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and beyond.
We believe that Nextdoor will continue to be a primary resource for our government partners now, and throughout the recovery phase of this crisis. As communities begin to invest in resilience, online public engagement will play an increasingly important role in decision making. We look forward to bringing our expertise in civic engagement to Nextdoor as we build out new capabilities for our partners in the coming years.
A sincere and heartfelt thank you to the entire leadership team at Nextdoor for making our team’s transition a success. Special thanks to Craig Lisowski, Antonio Silveira, Prakash Janakiraman, Ali Jafari, and Sarah Friar. And to the Public Agencies team, thank you for welcoming us with open arms, and for investing in onboarding our team successfully. We look forward to building an organization together that has great impact around the world.
Thank you to the 200+ government agencies, civic organizations, and real estate developers who partnered with Neighborland over the past decade. Over the years, several academic institutions have analyzed the social and economic impact of our partners’ projects. Estimates range from $3b to $30b in total social and economic impact, and many of these projects like National Landing in Arlington County VA, Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh NC, and Connect SoCal in Southern California are still in a planning phase and will be delivered over the next several years.
For the next year, we will continue to support our Neighborland partners, as we focus on building out a robust set of public engagement capabilities on the Nextdoor Public Agencies platform. We are already testing an integration of the two platforms on projects in San Francisco, Raleigh, NC, and beyond. If you’d like to discuss working together, please contact us.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to Neighborland over the years, especially our co-workers and investors. Over the past decade we’ve worked with some amazing people including Candy Chang, Scott Jacobsen, Chris Palmatier, Alan Williams, Bridget Harrington, Rob Chappell, James Reeves, Tom Kolbeck, Jon Axtell, Lawrence Grodeska, Frank Campanella, Meli Burgueño, Brendan Crain, Ellen Black, Matthew Hall, and Earl Carlson, among many others. A sincere thank you to all of the contributors, and to our families, for their support on the Neighborland journey.
We developed Neighborland with the generous support of Tulane University’s Social Entrepreneurship Program and the Rockefeller Foundation in New Orleans in 2011. We created our founding documents with the support of the University of Colorado’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. In 2012, we raised a seed investment with Toni Schneider and Christiaan Vorkink from True Ventures; Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jason Goldman of Obvious Corporation; Steve Schlafman and Ken Lerer at Lerer Hippeau Ventures; Topher Conway at SV Angel; Patrick Gallagher at Tuesday; and Chris Schultz and Peter Bodenheimer at Voodoo Ventures. And we deeply appreciate our advisors who included Alex Rainert, Ben Blumenrose, Enrique Allen, Stephen DeBerry, Josh Mendelson, Joshua To, and Ophelia Basgal.
At Nextdoor, we are uniquely positioned to scale this collective work globally. Together, we will help our government partners deliver more effective and responsive digital services. We are thrilled to continue our mission at a more impactful scale, alongside the incredible team at Nextdoor.
