The US neighbourhood social network, Nextdoor, led by Tyrone woman Sarah Friar, is to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (Spac) in a deal expected to value the firm at $4.3bn (€3.6bn).

It makes Ms Friar the highest-ranked female Irish executive in the global tech industry. It also looks certain to raise her own net worth, recently assessed by Forbes at $215m (€182m).

Ms Friar, a former CFO of Jack Dorsey’s payment firm Square, comes from Sion Mills in Tyrone, where her parents still live.

She has also worked in Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.

She became CEO of Nextdoor in 2019.

Nextdoor will merge with Khosla Ventures Acquisition Company, a shell firm created by the venture capital company of billionaire Vinod Khosla. The transaction will generate proceeds of $686m (€580m).

The deal includes a $270m (€228m) private investment from T Rowe Price Group and Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management, as well as Dragoneer Investment Group and other backers. It’s expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Nextdoor was founded in 2008 with the goal of creating a local version of Facebook. The app serves as a venue for people to organise and chronicle events and report suspicious activity. Critics have said it frequently facilitates racial profiling and a culture of fear.

The company had been considering various options for going public as far back as October, Bloomberg reported at the time. With the new funding, Nextdoor hopes to accelerate its growth. The company wants to attract additional users in the more than 275,000 neighborhoods in which it operates, boost engagement on the app and bring in additional advertisers, according to the statement.

Before becoming the company’s CEO, Ms Friar steered Square through an IPO. She was also instrumental in helping to formulate strategy, development and new products at the company.

Ms Friar has been a long-standing advocate for more representation of female executives in top tech jobs.

“Despite everything, we as women are still not clicking through into senior leadership,” she told the Irish Independent just before becoming Nextdoor’s CEO. “Progress is being made, but it’s very slow. You have some shining lights. But the unintentional biases that stop women getting to the CEO role are harder to assess. And then a lot of women end up as CEO in a ‘glass cliff’ role, as in you get in there but it’s a turnaround job for a company in trouble. In that position, already your chances are lower than a company with momentum and growth. That’s really what happened to Marissa [Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo]. So we, as women, need to crack through not just when things are tough but when they’re growing too. It has to be the board that supports it and the company that supports it.”

[Additional reporting from Bloomberg]