Nettle, a 10-month-old San Diego startup with a new social/local/mobile application for the global entertainment market, says it has raised $500,000 in seed financing led by Google Ventures. Advancit Capital and 500 Startups also participated, along with some angel investors that include former eBay and Qualcomm executives.
Nettle co-founder and CEO Brian Dear isn’t saying much about the venture. In an e-mail to me this morning, he says “the real big news is next month.” When I asked if Nettle will be a consumer-facing service, he replies, “Yes, we are doing a moble/social/local app for a large global consumer vertical. We’ll also have a corresponding website.”
Dear, who previously founded San Diego-based Eventful in 2004, started Nettle last October with Dan O’Neill, who is the chief technology officer. Dear and O’Neill worked together more than a decade ago at San Diego’s MP3.com.
Dear also worked in various management roles at RealNetworks and eBay. O’Neill, who stayed with MP3.com through its acquisition by Vivendi Universal, also was a co-founder of Trusonic, which was sold to Mood Media in 2007.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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