One Friday night, Alyx Van der Vorm could not stop thinking: “I have to do something with someone.”
But she found herself once again on Friday night, she is thinking of just heading to the gym. Then he realized that trying to make plans with people these days is incredibly tough.
“Understanding who is around, sending messages, waiting, research choices … It felt absurd that staying at home and watching a movie was a fountain, but watching a friend was ten steps,” Van der Vorm said.
At the age of 25, Van der Vorm is a very generation of Z, which is overly connected demographic who also somehow self -reported as an overwhelmingly isolated and lonely sense. Van Der Vorm studied computational neuroscience at Harvard University and later worked in a laboratory where he studied how social connections affect mental and physical health.
“The data is intense.” This gave me the confidence that work in friendship is not ‘soft’. It’s a real health problem. ”
So in 2020, Van der Vorm started working ClinicA social platform that helps users find community events to participate. Five years later, the application today has 50,000 active users who buy events for events and more than 200,000 users navigating events. The company has now raised $ 14 million in a series of A-led, led by Blitzscaling Ventures, with other investors, including IQram Magdon-Imail, the co-founder of Venmo and the F1-Driver-Turn-Investor Nico Rosberg.
Clyx itself is quite simple: it pulls events from sites such as the Ticketmaster and Tiktok and shows the events of its users in their cities that can register. It also offers suggestions for the places to try and users can upload their contacts to the app to see what events are their friends.
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The company has also created a compatibility machine that recommends that people can connect to events. “So, instead of walking in a foreigner room, you are already walking knowing,” Hey, Thomas is in the same things that I am. We must log in, “Van Der Vorm said.
The application even pushes people to connect and reconnect, which Van der Vorm says, removes the “embarrassing weight to get to the cold”, or relieves what some could perceive as the tiring task of cultivating a new friendship. Clyx also has a feature called programs, essentially a series of events that lead people to hang out with the same group of people while in laboratory sessions.
“This repetition is where the acquaintances turn into real friends and was one of the most exciting things we have unfolded,” Van Der Vorm said.
“People have friends,” he continued. “What they lack are friends near, free at the same time and for the same things. We deduct the design tax and push the right next step so that the momentum does not die after” we must hang soon “.
Van Der Vorm told TechCrunch that she met with her head investors through personal connections, including a accidental meeting with a stranger in a cafe that connects her with a friend investor.
He met with Magdon-Imail, co-founder of Venmo, after someone heard her talk to the Harvard Club and believed that the two had to meet. To hear Van der Vorm talk about it, it seems to be a “right position, right time” case.
“Simon Sinek was another,” he said. “Someone heard me talk about friendship. He said I was listening just like him, and I was introducing the introduction.”
Clyx only operates only in Miami and London and Van Der Vorm aims to start the application in New York this month and Sao Paulo this year. The company is also largely investing in product development, brand partnerships and cultural relations and, of course, expanding its team.
Clyx is not the first application trying to help people go out and meet new peoples. Posh, Meetup, Dice and even Eventbrite have done it for years. Bumble has the option of looking for friends, and even Hinge tries to make people go out more. But Van der Vorm hopes Clyx can stand out.
“My dream is to create a world where it is easy to go out and spend time with your friends as it is to sit at home and move around,” he said. “And if this helps people feel happier.
