Nuzzel, the social news startup led by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, is announcing a bunch of new investors today, including Matter, the Knight Foundation-backed incubator for media startups.
Abrams didn’t say how much additional cash he’s raised, but he described the new funding as “relatively small in size compared to some of our tech-industry investors” — this was less about the size of the investment and more about getting backers from the news and media industry. Nuzzel previously raised $3.4 million in funding.
While the startup offers different ways to explore the news, its core appeal is very simple. It creates a news feed and news alerts based on what your friends are sharing on social media.
“As we have solved overload problems for news consumers, we realized that there are also opportunities for Nuzzel to help publishers,” Abrams said in an emailed statement. “The intersection of social and mobile platforms represent both challenges and opportunities for news publishers. Nuzzel can help connect the right news readers with the hundreds of pieces of content that news companies are publishing each day.”
The new investors are: Matter; Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; Arturo Duran, managing partner at IVA Ventures; Craig Forman, partner at NextNews Ventures; Jim Friedlich, CEO of Empirical Media; Andrew Miller, former CEO of the Guardian Media Group; and John Paton, founder and former CEO of Digital First Media.