The social networking firm NextBlock in Singapore secured S$500,000 (US$361,895) in a pre-seed round of investment that was headed by Plug and Play APAC.
Farquhar Venture Capital and Min-Liang Tan, the CEO of Razer, are two other investors.
By serving as a gathering place for users in a neighbourhood, Darrell Zhang, Willynn Ng, Mike Nguyen, and Bryan Lee, the co-founders of NextBlock, want to increase neighbour-to-neighbour conversations.
The program now offers two tabs: “My Estate,” which connects users with neighbours in the same estate cluster, and “Explore,” which allows users to check into hot subjects. Additionally, it enables users to create interest groups.
Since its debut in June of this year, the platform has reportedly attracted 15,000 members. In the future, NextBlock wants to include a marketplace feature so that its users may purchase and sell goods, as well as a merchant module to support local companies.
The funding has reportedly already been used to launch NextBlock’s operations in Singapore and has been allocated for its user growth and foundation-building initiatives, according to the business. As the business aims to grow its operations to larger markets, the investors will further act as mentors.
