Meet the founders of 18 startups disrupting the social-media scene with alternative ways to connect online
Founder(s): Antoine Martin, CEO
Amo isn't Martin's first rodeo in social. In 2017, Snapchat acquired Martin's app Zenly, a social location-sharing tool he had founded while in college, for more than $300 million.
After working at Snapchat for five years and helping the social-media giant grow its mapping tools, Martin left the company in May 2022 (Zenly was shut down by Snap later in 2022). Since then, Martin has been building a series of social apps under the Amo name alongside nine founding members.
Location: Paris
What they are building:
Amo's first app, ID, a content-sharing app that lets users create unique collages (including drawings, photos, and links) as profiles, launched in November. Soon after, Amo launched Capture, a photo-sharing app that has its users taking interactive photos by tilting their phones, and Location, which harkens back to Martin's Zenly roots with another location-sharing app.
Martin is embracing a simpler app experience for users, too. Especially after working at a large social-media giant that does everything from DMs to short-form videos to an entire ecosystem of content.
"Super apps made a lot of sense if you're trying to drive ad revenue and if you have a monopolistic, captive user base," Martin said. But — "Does it make sense for a user? Is that the user's strongest interest? Clearly not. A user's interest is to open an app on the right screen, right away, without having to use a tab bar to get to where they want to go."
Funding: €18 million (about $19.5 million) from firms New Wave, Coatue Management, DST Global Partners, and more, per the company.
Founder: Michael Ebel, founder and CEO
Before founding Atmosfy, Ebel was a global project manager at Instagram, where he launched operational machine-learning initiatives to improve the video algorithms of Instagram's global community.
Before his role at Instagram, he consulted for PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Private Equity Group to help facilitate multiple IPOs. And prior to that, he was a captain in the US Air Force, serving as a flight commander.
Ebel has an MBA from Berkeley Haas School of Business. He also attended the US Air Force Institute of Technology, where he graduated in military and strategic leadership.
Location: San Francisco
What they're building:
Ebel founded the video-first platform for discovering dining and nightlife in 2021.
There are over 1 million businesses on the platform across over 150 countries and 10,000 cities, according to the company. Each city has its own feed of local customers.
After noticing TikTok's growth in search and food-related videos, Ebel set out to build a platform for short-form review videos left by local customers. The app features in-the-moment content highlighting dining, nightlife, and travel experiences. Any user can create content for the app in their city and users get real-time updates on their friends and their recommendations.
Funding: $14 million from firms including Redpoint Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Canaan Partners, among others, per the company.
Founders: Cofounders Andy McCune and Luca Marra
Before Cosmos, McCune was the cofounder of the photo collage app Unfold (acquired by Squarespace).
Marra was previously a creative director and web developer.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Launched this year, Cosmos is similar to Pinterest and lets users save photos to folders called "clusters" to share with the wider community, and friends, or keep private. The app incorporates AI tools, which can analyze a photo and tell users more about it. The app is more artist-focused — and unlike other social platforms, it doesn't have any notifications, likes, or comments. Right now, the app is invite-only, and users can join the waitlist.
Funding: $6 million, led by GV and Accel, per the company.
Founders: Emma Bates, CEO, and Divia Singh, COO
Bates and Singh founded Diem in 2020 after working together at the direct-to-consumer luggage company Away.
The idea for Diem came to life after Bates needed to take the morning-after pill while working at Away and began asking colleagues about their experiences taking the pill, recording their responses anonymously.
Instead of searching for answers on the internet, she wanted to hear from real people. Recognizing this instinct, she teamed up with Singh to begin researching search and social experiences online.
"We seek community answers because that provides us valid perspectives that often aren't represented in existing data or information, and it also validates our experience," Bates said. "We feel a little less alone, a bit more normal."
Location: New York
What they are building:
Bates told BI that Diem is a "social search engine" and a hub "where you can come and ask personal taboo, funny, important questions and get answers both from across the internet that we summarize for you, and also from real people." Diem launched its mobile app last year and the platform has about 45,000 users.
Funding: $3.7 million, per the company.
Founder(s): Jad Esber, CEO; cofounders Apurva Chitnis, Jennie Silber, Kirill Noskov, Julian Delerme, Lydia Ding, Simona Ruzer, and Clare Carroll
Esber and the founding team launched Koodos Labs, a company building products and conducting research "on the next generation of the internet," in 2020.
After getting his MBA at Harvard, Esber was a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
"I was very lucky in the year that I was at the Berkman Kline Center to interact with a lot of folks that have built the last generation of social companies," Esber said. "A big part of my focus was like, 'Okay, in hindsight, what would you have done differently?'"
Esber started his career at Google and YouTube. The founding team also draws talent from companies like TikTok, Airbnb, and other startups.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Shelf is the first product that Koodos Labs launched and it is inspired by the way we interact with bookshelves: a brief insight into what someone's interests are. Acting like a link-in-bio of sorts, Shelf pages let users update what they are watching, reading, listening to, and more. Eventually, the platform plans to integrate more tools like auto-updating what TV shows and movies people are watching by voluntarily connecting streaming accounts.
Funding: Undisclosed pre-seed and seed
Founder(s): Isabella Epstein, CEO, and Tina Mai, COO
Kndrd, a new app that helps strangers connect and make plans, grew out of a feeling of loneliness Epstein, 25, felt when she first moved to New York City after graduating college and working in finance.
Mai, an 18-year-old engineer and freshman at Stanford, joined Epstein as cofounder last year.
Location: New York
What they're building:
The app, which launched as a beta test on Testflight in 2024, has about 6,000 waitlist members that are based in New York, Epstein told BI.
Kndrd's core objective is to get people off of their phones and meet IRL.
Its interface is simple: post a hangout — maybe it's a walk through Central Park or going to get drinks at a bar in Brooklyn — and wait for people to react and join you. Currently, Epstein is hand-selecting members off the waitlist but plans to automate that process in time.
Funding: Bootstrapped
Founder(s): Laura Mitchell, cofounder and CEO, and Jessica Duveen, cofounder and COO
In 2016, Mitchell started organizing online communities with IRL events for queer women through traditional social platforms and ran groups with over 5,000 members collectively.
Mitchell's background is in healthcare, and she was inspired to build The Lo. after she found it difficult to connect with the queer women's community everywhere she lived, finding only dating apps on the App Store.
Duveen has a background working in the impact investing field, and throughout her career, she has worked to help social impact investors.
Location: Atlanta
What they're building:
After seeing the impact of local community-building work, and during idle time during the pandemic, Mitchell and Duveen combined their skills to build The Lo., which officially launched in June 2023.
The Lo. is an online community for queer women, as well as nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, to connect online and then meet in person through both member-run and company-run events.
As a membership-based platform, users pay $15 a month or $140 a year to access the community. The company also offers limited partial scholarships to those who cannot join due to cost.
Funding: $120,000 from the Techstars Impact Accelerator raised in 2023, per the company.
Founder(s): Miri Buckland, COO and cofounder, and Ellie Buckingham, CEO and cofounder
Buckland has a background as a marketer, community builder, and consumer tech operator. Before cofounding Landing, she held roles at Sky TV in London and in venture capital in San Francisco. She graduated from Stanford University School of Business.
Buckingham held roles at Goldman Sachs in New York and design-focused startups in San Francisco before Landing. She's a Graduate of Stanford University School of Business and Dartmouth College.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Landing is a Gen-Z-focused, Pinterest-like platform, where users can create virtual mood and design boards inspired by fashion, home design, and other aesthetics.
The platform lets its users build digital collages for themselves, and to share with the community and friends. The app launched in September 2023, and since then has over 500,000 app downloads, 1 million boards created, and 4 million images uploaded.
Buckland told BI that right now, Landing doesn't have any ads or other monetization features, but the team plans to integrate those in the future.
Funding: $6 million from investors including Cowboy Ventures, Defy VC, and DreamMachine Ventures, per the company.
Founder: Jennifer Rhiannon Lewis, CEO, and Kel Rakowski, chief creative officer
Before Lex, Lewis was head of growth at the women's healthtech company Tia. She has a degree from Oxford University. Rakowski is a creative in New York, and her previous experience includes being photo director of the magazine Metropolis and cofounder of the textile studio New Friends.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Lex lets queer people find each other and connect online, and then take those connections to real-life hangouts. From hookups and dates to attending local events, the app lets users create profiles with tags displaying what they are looking for, and the homepage is organized by filters like location. Users can scroll the app and read posts from friends or the wider community of people looking to meet in real life.
While Lex launched as a dating platform, it's evolved into a community-focused app.
"People just started using the app more for friends and more for community," Lewis said. "It was just something that we started to see organically, and then we did a lot of research and we actually found that our most loyal users of the app, like the people who would go to Lex over anywhere else, were the people that were using Lex for friends and community."
About 30% of the posts on Lex are dating-specific, while 70% revolve around friends, events, and other community topics, Lewis told BI.
Funding: $7 million from firms like Stellation, Slauson & Co, and Female Founders Fund, per the company.
Founder(s): Tiffany "TZ" Zhong
Zhong is no stranger to the internet (or startups), and as someone who grew up making friends on Twitter (now X), she knows how important finding community online can be.
"Right now, at the end of the day, one of the most important things, one of the most important human behaviors that's never going to go away is the need for connection," Zhong told BI.
Before launching Nospace in 2023, Zhong was running Web3 startup Islands XYZ. She is also the founder of a VC firm, Pineapple Capital.
Location: San Francisco, Tokyo, Los Angeles
What they're building:
Nospace's tagline is "the most social network" — and its name sounds similar to MySpace for a reason. The app is primarily a text-based feed where users (who are as young as 13) post in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Profile pages can list what you're listening to, and watching, and where you're based or where you are traveling to next.
Zhong wants Nospace to be somewhere people can find their people. "They can be as weird and as authentic as they want" on the app, she said.
The app is currently invite-only and has a waitlist of over 350,000, Zhong told BI.
Funding: Undisclosed, with investors including Alexis Ohanian's 776 fund, per the company.
Founder: Tyler Bainbridge
Bainbridge, a former Meta employee, was inspired to develop an app after finding success with his Substack newsletter, Perfectly Imperfect, which he cofounded with Alexander Cushing. PI.FYI, a new social network tha Bainbridge self-funded, came to fruition after he was laid off from his role as a senior software engineer at Meta.
"I was kind of fed up with the existing options online, and I thought there was nothing that really captured that feeling that I had on the internet growing up," Bainbridge told BI.
Location: New York
What they're building:
The app launched earlier this year, and Bainbridge shared the announcement to his newsletter, which has over 50,000 subscribers. PI.FYI has so far passed 12,000 users, per the company. The platform lets users connect and share interests, from movies and restaurants to recipes and music.
The app is built around its users' recommendations and community building, instead of algorithms.
"I'm not making product decisions based off of how people are using the site," he said. "I'm operating on intuition and trying to feel out a space rather than shifting a button four pixels to the right because it has better engagement, which is how working at a big company kind of works, at least on the tech side."
Funding: Bootstrapped
Founder(s): Nathan Sharp, CEO, and Ryan Olson, CTO
Sharp and Olson were part of the team at Instagram behind building and shipping the Stories product. Sharp, the lead product manager on the team, and Olson, the lead iOS engineer, knew early on that they would build something together in the future.
In 2022, they both left Meta and went on to found Lone Palm Labs. The two launched their first app, Retro, in 2023.
Location: San Francisco and New York
What they're building:
Retro is the child of Instagram staffers who wanted to create a slower, more passive photo-sharing experience. In other words, Retro is the Instagram for the "cozy web," as Sharp put it.
"It's called Retro because it is a throwback to a simpler time in social when it was really just your friends and just your photos," Sharp told BI. "You didn't have to think about a ton of things like, 'How should I caption this? How should I filter this? Who's going to see this? How long is it going to exist?'"
The app's premise is akin to a photo album where users can upload pictures and videos from a calendar week to a feed only viewable by friends. While the app does have the functionality to take a picture and upload it directly to the weekly feed, the app is designed to be used retroactively (another nod to the name). Users can even mail friends postcards directly from the app.
On any given day, about 50% of the people opening Retro post a photo or a video to the app — a signal to Sharp and Olson that people feel comfortable sharing their lives on the app. That sharing participation rate is also "higher than we've seen in our previous work in social," Sharp said.
Funding: Undisclosed pre-seed and seed round.
Founder: Nick Confrey, CEO
Confrey, who was a software engineer at Meta on its New Product Experimentation team before launching Seam, recognized that across social media, sharing behaviors are "shifting into these smaller, more curated private spaces."
Wanting to build for this trend, Confrey launched Seam in 2022 with cofounder Katy Atherholt, who has since left the startup.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Seam is a social network that allows users to code and design their own pages and experiences. A mini-app created using Seam, FitCheck, where users can send outfits to their friends over iMessage, peaked at No. 7 on the iMessage app store, Confrey told BI.
Already available on desktop, Seam is launching a mobile app for iOS this quarter, two years after the company launched.
Funding: $2.5 million, per the company.
Founder: Hilary Xiaoya Fan, cofounder and head of marketing and growth; S'more's other cofounder asked to remain anonymous
Fan has almost a decade of experience in tech, growth, and e-commerce. She began her career in marketing for various VC-backed, e-commerce startups in New York.
She led a team at Etsy and provided guidance on market entry and new business growth to international CPG companies and startups.
What they're building:
S'more is an online community for New Yorkers to share their interests and experiences around the city.
Fan was inspired by the power of word-of-mouth recommendations and how locals in New York City find honest reviews on where to grab brunch or see an immersive experience.
The app looks similar to Instagram, with a carousel post of images shared by real people and a text review underneath. Users have the ability to follow who shared the post, and so far, over 60,000 users have joined S'more.
Funding: Undisclosed seed round.
Founders: Alphonzo Terrell, CEO, and DeVaris Brown, CTO
After the fallout of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover in 2022, Terrell, who was one of thousands of Twitter staffers laid off, teamed up with former Twitter colleague Brown to build Spill — "a place for visual conversation that puts culture first," per the company.
While at Twitter, Terrell led the platform's social and editorial team, and before then, worked at entertainment companies like HBO, Showtime, Def Jam, and Sony Music.
Brown left his post as a product manager lead at Twitter in 2020 to confound Meroxa, a data infrastructure startup. Prior to Twitter, he worked on product for Heroku, VSCO, and Zendesk.
Location: Los Angeles
What they're building:
Spill, which launched at the end of 2022, is not shy about confronting "legacy social media" platforms and the problems that have emerged out of Big Tech. The platform, which invites users to "spill the tea" by sharing text posts, images, videos, and GIFs, prioritizes safety and crediting the creators behind viral content. Each post is referred to as a Spill, which can then be quoted, reposted, and commented on. The app also hosts "Tea Parties" where users can connect via events, from book clubs to speed dating.
As of December 2023, about a year after its launch, Spill has been downloaded by over 400,000 people across iOS and Android, the startup told BI.
Funding: Over $5 million from a pre-seed investment round led by MaC Venture Capital and an extension from Collide Capital, per the company.
Founder(s): Alexandra Debow, CEO; Weilyn Chong, COO; Nathan Ahn, CTO
Growing up in Hong Kong — as did her cofounders — Debow, 21, came of age very social and aware that people come in and out of your life. She and her cofounders built Swsh (an acronym for somewhere, somehow) as a way to keep in touch with friends.
Debow previously founded Alive Vibe, a virtual events marketplace, during the COVID-19 pandemic. She and Chong also cofounded a podcast network called The Entrepre女ers Network.
Ahn was previously a software engineering intern at Meta.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Like many early-stage consumer tech startups, Swsh is finding its market fit. Its last iteration, which launched in early 2023, was an app to interact with friends via a Q&A style. The startup retired this app and will be focused on a photo-sharing tool under the same Swsh name.
In February, Swsh will launch a new app experience that is a photo-sharing app to help friends share pictures from parties, trips, or other memories. If the event startup Partiful is a replacement for Facebook Events, then Swsh may be the replacement for the Facebook Photo Album.
Funding: $1.7 million led by Stellation Capital and MaC Venture Capital, per the company.
Founders: Bobby Pinckney, cofounder and CEO, and Michelle Yin, cofounder and CTO
Pinckney and Yin met while studying business administration and computer science at the University of Southern California. Before Verse, they founded Discz, a music discovery app for Gen Z that has over 1.5 million downloads.
Location: New York
What they're building:
Verse is an extension of Discz, a Gen-Z-focused app helping users build a community around music. Like Myspace, Discz lets users build customizable spaces online to show off their favorite music and other interests.
With Verse, users can access templates, AI, and other editing and creative tools to make a page that can be shared on Instagram stories, directly, or as a link-in-bio. It's like a digital scrapbook, with music and other interactive elements.
Verse, which will launch in February, was beta tested on Discz, and 65,000 people have created over 500,00 "verses" in beta.
Funding: Undisclosed
Founder(s): Mallory Loar, CEO and cofounder; Kevin Wilson, CDO and cofounder; Zack Zapasnik, CTO and cofounder
Three friends who met working at Discord, Loar, Wilson, and Zapasnik set out to help people make in-person plans, and get inspired with date ideas.
Loar has experience building online communities and leading marketing teams within tech and gaming. Once a popular gaming blogger on Tumblr, her experience online paved the way for her career at SteelSeries. There, she focused on influencer marketing and PR.
Wilson is a product designer with over 10 years of experience designing digital products and leading design teams.
And Zapasnik is an entrepreneur and engineer specializing in the streaming industry and communication platforms.
Location: San Francisco
What they're building:
Whatever helps users build connections with their friends and partners.
The app gives users tools for planning in-person dates and discovering date night ideas.
The company said Whatever has a community of 7,000 people across various channels, including its newsletter, waitlist, Discord, and social platforms.
Funding: Investors include Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare; Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO of Discord; and Eros Resmini, Discord's former CMO, per the company.
Read more: Why 3 ex-Discord staffers are building a new app for the 'relationship economy'