Social media man­agers and con­tent man­agers on the look­out for new ideas might feel more than a twinge of admi­ra­tion (and per­haps a touch of envy) for Nirav Tolia, the young founder of the ground­break­ing social net­work­ing start­up Nexdoor.

Fus­ing phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al communities

Nextdoor has a mis­sion that brings a whole new mean­ing to being a com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er: to restore a sense of con­nect­ed­ness to neigh­bor­hoods where neigh­bors don’t real­ly know each oth­er very well, if at all.  That cov­ers quite a lot of neigh­bor­hoods these days.  But Nextdoor aims to change all that: instead of oper­at­ing on the assump­tion that vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ties are alter­na­tives to phys­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties, it fus­es them together.

Nextdoor pro­vides a con­ge­nial vir­tu­al meet­ing place for neigh­bors to reach one anoth­er, a place where they can do any­thing from ask­ing to bor­row a pow­er tool to shar­ing infor­ma­tion about a local bur­glary or mak­ing busi­ness recommendations.

Users sim­ply sub­mit their email and phys­i­cal address­es, where­upon they’re ver­i­fied either by means of a post­card with a code or via a cred­it card lined to their address.  As soon as they’re approved, they get access to a raft of local infor­ma­tion includ­ing mes­sage boards, maps, and even lost and found bul­letins, all post­ed by mem­bers of their local community.

And con­sid­er­ing that the site’s mem­bers are now post­ing over half a mil­lion mes­sages every day across 8,000 U.S. neigh­bor­hoods, this is one idea that has def­i­nite­ly hit upon an untapped need. Nextdoor is grow­ing vig­or­ous­ly, not least because new­ly-approved users are encour­aged to invite oth­er neigh­bors to join: more than 40 neigh­bor­hoods are get­ting added to the site every day.

This is per­haps why the San Fran­cis­co-based start­up man­aged to secure $21.6 mil­lion in Feb­ru­ary, tak­ing its total fund­ing since its launch in 2010 to over $40 million.

The next big thing?

In a recent inter­view with the Los Ange­les Times, one of Nextdoor’s investors, Grey­lock ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist David Sze (who also sits on the startup’s board) said:

“Every social net­work on Earth pitch­es me, and I say no to near­ly every sin­gle one of them. Nextdoor is unique­ly posi­tioned to become the social net­work for your neighborhood.”

Omi­nous­ly for Goliaths like Face­book and Twit­ter, he added that Nextdoor “has all the hall­marks of being the next great mas­sive­ly val­ued social network.”