• Investors Don't Just Like LikeALittle A Little, They Like It A Lot

    Mg Siegler

    MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

    Thursday, April 28th, 2011

    Anytime there’s a startup that has been quietly catching fire, you can always find a trail of investors warming themselves by the flames. Take LikeALittle, for example. Though they’ve kept it quiet, we’ve now confirmed with multiple sources that they raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others at some point earlier this year.

    And it makes sense. LikeALittle first popped on our radar back in December of last year while we were looking into a Hacker News thread claiming that one of the Y Combinator Winter ’11 startups had done 20 million pageviews in six weeks — and was growing by over 1 million pageviews a day. That startup, of course, was LikeALittle, a social network for flirting started by former Googlers and Microsofties, Evan ReasPrasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal.

    If you haven’t heard of LikeALittle before it’s probably because you’re over the age of 22. Like Facebook in the early days, LikeALittle aims its anonymous flirting network at college campuses. In fact, the college atmosphere mixed with the short messages users send mixed with the anonymous layer makes it seem a bit like Twitter meets Facebook meet Chatroulette — with the sexual undertones of flirting mixed in. No wonder investors are hot on this thing.

    Rules of the LikeALittle game include:

    • When you make a comment, you are given a random fruit-name, for a given thread.
    • This helps you maintain a conversation, while being anonymous.
    • For a new thread, you get a new random fruit-name.

    Fun. And they have tools to remove sexually explicit and offensive posts. They like to think of themselves as a “flirting-facilitator platform”.

    The $1 million round was raised at a $10 million valuation, we hear. And they’re apparently already putting the money to good use: they now own lal.com.

    This is obviously one to watch.

    Company: Circle Inc
    Launch Date: October 27, 2010
    Funding: $6M

    Circle is the app that answers the question, “Who’s Around You?” Know when your friends & networks are nearby, wherever you are, no matter where you go. Circle tells you when your friends, or people from your networks (college, work, hometown, professional group, etc.), are near you. You’ll be magically notified whenever they’re around. Circle is an award-winning app, featured by Apple in over 50 countries and many of the top press publications.

    → Learn more