Francesco Vitali will be the first to admit that when co-founder Chris Siametis first pitched him on Rent a Cyber Friend, he didn’t quite get the idea.
“Who’s going to pay someone to talk to someone?” Vitali told TechCrunch. “But Chris was persistent. Chris is a millennial and I’m Gen X, so it wasn’t easy for me to understand his vision.”
Vitali had worked with Siametis for about two decades together. they ran 48 MOVIESa international short film festival (Vitali is also a film producer). So he took a leap of faith to trust his partner in the idea he couldn’t shake: a video chat platform where people can pay by the minute for a casual chat with a “cyber friend.”
Rent a Cyber Friend by ballooning to 3 million registered users without raising venture capital or spending money on marketing. The company doesn’t even have social media because it’s too poor to devote resources to it. The startup is part of the Startup Battlefield and will be presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month in San Francisco.
The company’s rapid growth proved Vitali’s first reactions wrong, but as he used the product himself, he began to realize that there’s a big market for human connection — especially in an age when people are paying to talk to AI bots.
“Loneliness is the biggest disease in the world right now,” Vitali said. “Millions are lonely and underemployed or searching for purpose. So we created a platform where human time has value again and a place where being human matters.”
Cyber friends are first checked to verify their identity and then can set a per-minute rate for their chats. the platform keeps 20% of this fee. People don’t just pay for companionship. Some cyber friends charge a higher rate if they are academics or proven experts in a particular subject area, or if they speak a particular language that a user would like to practice.
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For any social media platform – especially one that connects people in real-time video chats – security and content moderation is a challenge. Vitali notes that the platform has a blocking capability, but as the company continues to grow, it will need to further invest in maintaining a healthy environment. He said next on the product roadmap is a more powerful and efficient system to screen potential cyber friends more quickly and thoroughly.
Vitali’s turning point came shortly after starting the company when he was linked with a 19-year-old from China. He noticed that this person was one of the most active users on the site and was spending $200 a day to talk to others. Vitali rigged the site to be the only cyber friend available and used the opportunity to ask the user about their experience without revealing that he founded the company.
“She said, ‘I don’t feel safe going out to the mall and meeting strangers, but this site allows me to exchange culture and meet people from all over the world,’ and that was the first moment I realized we have something here,” Vitali recalled.
He still believes that the connections people make in person are irreplaceable. But in an Internet where people are drawn into addictive or dangerous connections with AI chatbots designed to maximize engagement, this step toward humanity means something to him.
If you’d like to learn more about Rent a Cyber Friend from the company itself — while checking out dozens of others, hearing their suggestions, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.
