Nuzzel raises $1.7M for its social social content curator that anyone can now use

Social news aggregator Nuzzel has raised $1.7 million in new funding from a bunch of individual investors including Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, Google’s Matt Cutts, SoftBank’s vice chairman Nikesh Arora, and others. This announcement comes as the company evolves its social aggregator product — it’s now available to everyone, meaning that you don’t need to have a Twitter account to actually use the service.

The new funding will be used to further scale the product, including bringing on more engineers and improving product development of such features as its newsletter platform. Money will also be put into resources exploring integrations with publishers, something that hasn’t been a major focus yet.

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Founded by Jonathan Abrams, who started the social network Friendster, Nuzzel is a service that organizes all the news according to those who are sharing it. Previously, you needed a Twitter account in order to connect the dots and make it personalized — since I follow my boss Harrison Weber, I’m going to know what stories he’s written and shared today, for example.

With Nuzzel 2.0 launching on the Web, iOS, and Android, anyone can take advantage of social curation. Instead of getting personalized results by authenticating with Twitter, users will be able to find relevant feeds and add them to their favorites or subscribe to them.

Other updates include a search feature that’ll aid in discovery of feeds and stories. You can even opt in to receive subscription alerts for your feeds by email or push notification.

Some might note that the $1.7 million raised by Nuzzel is the exact same as the amount it raised in 2012. Abrams told VentureBeat that it’s “just coincidence.” In fact, “we always seem to end up trying to raise another $1 million to $1.5 million, and then getting oversubscribed, and then trying to wrap it up , it ends up around $1.7 million.”