A mere two months after its Sep­tem­ber 2012 launch, start­up social news aggre­ga­tor Nuzzel has just secured an impres­sive $1.7 mil­lion in seed funding.

It’s stretch­ing seman­tics a lit­tle to call Nuzzel a “start­up firm” right now — it’s more of a one man band. At present, its only full-time employ­ee is its founder, Jonathan Abrams, although thanks to the new fund­ing it’s now adver­tis­ing for new recruits (specif­i­cal­ly, a full-stack soft­ware engi­neer, an iOS engi­neer, a DevOps engi­neer and a growth/analytics engi­neer). Nuzzel clear­ly plans to launch apps for iPhones and iPads.

Abrams is no stranger to the world of social net­work­ing star­tups and has quite the cat­a­logue of achieve­ments to his name. He either found­ed or co-found­ed a glit­ter­ing list of social sites (the Founders Den, Friend­ster, Social­izr and HotLinks) although this is his first for­ay into social news.

What’s new about Nuzzel
But hard-nosed chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, chief rev­enue offi­cers and busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates will be ask­ing what, in a mar­ket sat­u­rat­ed with social news apps, is unique about Nuzzel?

From the out­set, it aims to make social news aggre­ga­tion as clean, sim­ple and fast as pos­si­ble.  It’s essen­tial­ly a link col­lec­tor, pulling the most shared news post­ed by the peo­ple you’re fol­low­ing on Face­book or Twit­ter. It then deliv­ers the rel­e­vant news to you direct­ly either via a dai­ly email or on the online dash­board. Users aren’t con­fined to con­tent shared on their imme­di­ate social net­work, how­ev­er: there’s a “news you might have missed” page con­tain­ing links from “friends of friends” too, so that the social feeds of a broad­er range of users can be viewed.

It needs min­i­mal set-up on the part of new users and it’s prov­ing in beta to be a reli­able indi­ca­tor of inter­est­ing con­tent. Just sign in through Twit­ter, and Nuzzel gets to work imme­di­ate­ly, aggre­gat­ing all the news your friends have found interesting.

An ‘A’ list of investors
Until now, the site has been built sole­ly by Abrams with­out exter­nal fund­ing.  But with his rep­u­ta­tion and con­tacts to assist him, he’s attract­ed a ver­i­ta­ble “Hol­ly­wood ‘A’ List” of Sil­i­con Val­ley investors, includ­ing Dave McClure of 500 Star­tups fame, Ron­ny Con­way of Andreessen Horowitz, George Zachary of Charles Riv­er Ven­tures, Eric Reiss of The Lean Start­up and Stephanie Palmeri and Jeff Clavier of Soft­Tech VC.