Smalltown Announces $3 Million Series A Funding

Smalltown (www.smalltown.com), a new user-generated content site building a “local web” platform to connect businesses and neighbors with their surrounding community, recently launched from stealth operations and announced $3 Million in Series A funding from early-stage technology investor Formative Ventures. The capital will be used to advance Smalltown’s strategy to build the infrastructure for a truly local web by connecting families, service providers, merchants and organizations to find and share information about the important things close to home.

Smalltown’s unique patent-pending technology enables the company to launch dedicated websites for hyper-local neighborhood communities, where the company will actively partner with community members to ensure a vibrant online presence. Smalltown websites will be networked to create an integrated platform called the Local Web. The company also marks the public launch of their first pilot town – Smalltown, Burlingame. Smalltown, San Mateo will follow on October 16th.

“The integrated Local Web doesn’t exist yet,” said Hal Rucker, CEO and co-founder of Smalltown. “Today there is local search, which offers a mix of information that is difficult to track and use; social media platforms, where people can meet and share reviews and recommendations; and classified sites, where people can find roommates and sell cars. But there really isn’t one generalized platform where people in a local community can find and share information about all things local – nannies, items for sale or exchange, local events, merchant coupons, weekend activities, you name it. Smalltown is building a platform for the Local Web, a network of hundreds of hyper-local sites that have the granularity to address the needs of local economies.”

While most commercial searches are local in nature, according to Borrell Associates, fewer than half of the nearly 12 million small businesses in the U.S. have websites. Two trends are driving growth in the local marketplace and paving the way for companies like Smalltown to succeed: (i) the explosive growth in local search (predicted to reach $1.7 billion in 2007, Borrell Associates 2006), and (ii) the adoption of social media.