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 Reas, Prasanna 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.
