From: betaboston.com

In the era of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Eric Groves says it’s surprising that many small business owners still attend monthly networking breakfasts, hoping to make connections and get referrals that will build their businesses. His startup, Alignable, has just raised $8 million in new funding to continue its efforts to bring that person-to-person referral process online, and also help small business owners share advice with one another.

I wrote about the company just after it launched in the Boston suburbs and Cape Cod, in July 2013; Groves says Alignable now operates across the United States and Canada, in about 7,000 different communities.

“Businesses join for two primary reasons: 60 percent because they want to build a local network that will help them drive word-of-mouth referrals,” Groves explains by e-mail, “and 40 percent just to be connected with others they can turn to for advice.” He says the majority of users are businesses that sell directly to consumers.

Among its features, Alignable allows one business to share information about a special offer or event at a nearby business on its social media channels. For example, a restaurant on Main Street could let its customers know about a reading at the bookstore around the corner. Business owners can also pose questions to one another.

Alignable’s new funding round is being led by Mayfield Fund, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm.

“We were consciously looking for West Coast VC money for this round,” Groves says. “We wanted access to the West Coast venture DNA that specializes in building massive networks and marketplaces like LinkedIn, Lyft, Nextdoor, and Facebook, and that’s where it is…” Alignable co-founder Venkat Krishnamurthy earned his PhD at Stanford University, which is where he met Mayfield partner Navin Chadda.

The company is still focusing on building an audience of loyal users, as opposed to generating revenue, Groves says. “That said, we recently provided our users with the ability to do ratings and reviews of many of the leading [small and mid-size business] vendors, Constant Contact, Yelp, Quickbooks, and many others, and it’s fascinating to see the level of interest there has been in simply having access to this data.” Creating ways for those vendors to market to and communicate with small business owners could “open up a lot of paths to monetization,” Groves says.