Estonian VC Allan Martinson’s newest startup Inner Circle has apparently closed its first seed investment round just few days ago.

Estonian business registry shows that new investors behind the project are Regio (the well-known mapping, mobile positioning and GIS software developer), Estonian Development Fund (Arengufond) and its Chairman of the Supervisory Board, entrepreneur Raivo Vare. Investment sum, as I recall Martinson telling me earlier, was around 200 000 euros.

I wrote a post on Inner Circle few weeks ago. In september the team will go to Silicon Valley to prepare for the launch.

Inner Circle aims to establish a new social network, much like Facebook, but lot more private, crap-free and easier to use.

Martinson says that 95 percent of all the communication currently takes place in smaller groups: among family, collegues, friends, hobby groups, training mates etc. Facebook is extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of users (over 200 000 in Estonia already), it has a plentitude of functionality, but Facebook is not the best communication tool for smaller groups.

„Facebook has lists and groups, but they are inconvenient to use. Everyone is your „friend“, irrespective of how they became your fiends,“ Martinson says.
In the new soon-to-be revealed environment of Inner Circle, currently in rough beta phase, the users will be able to switch in between different groups with ease, share content, information,  multimedia – in other words do all the modern social communication things – separately in each of their group.