- Pie, an IRL social startup, raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures.
- Founded by Bonobos’ Andy Dunn, Pie focuses on in-person connections and events.
- Pie plans to use the funds to support event creators and scale to other markets.
Social-networking startups are ditching online friends and followers for in-person, real-life connections.
Pie, a Chicago-based startup founded by menswear brand Bonobos’ Andy Dunn, is joining the race to help people make friends.
One of many emerging “IRL social” apps, Pie lets users plan and join in on IRL hangouts. The app is already equipped with an AI assistant and is piloting an enterprise product offering.
“The battle for offline attention is the next big thing in consumer,” Dunn told Business Insider.
Amid a loneliness epidemic declared by US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and social-media users growing jaded with online life, startups like Posh (a sort of TikTok feed for events) and 222 (a way to meet strangers via dinners or events) have also raised venture capital this year with apps aiming to help people find friends.
Pie recently announced that it raised a $11.5 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green. The round also included participation from Chicago-based fund Origin Ventures and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams. Its latest round puts Pie’s total capital raised at $24 million, per the company.
Building and growing an app for making friends
Like many startups, Pie has had to pivot. It launched in 2020 as a friend matchmaking app, akin to a Bumble Friends experience.
“We got a lot of matching, a lot of profile browse, but no one would reach out to the other person,” Dunn said.
After reading Dr. Marisa Fanco’s book “Platonic,” Dunn said he went back to the drawing board. Scrolling through potential friends wasn’t going to cut it — it had to be recurring group hangouts to help people meet and stay connected.
With a team of 10 Chicago-based staffers, Pie doubled down on building an IRL app and using the city as a testing ground.
“Chicago doesn’t have the saturation of consumer apps you have in New York City, Los Angeles, or San Francisco,” Dunn said.
In February and March, the startup began testing local, curated events, dubbed “Pie Originals,” in Chicago, such as a monthly silent book club or a bi-monthly “Dudes Getting Pancakes” hangout. Dunn credits the app’s growth to this strategy. It hit 20,000 monthly active users in six months of testing the Pie Originals.
Local event creators, like Mary Doctor, who hosts a show-and-tell event for adults, have used Pie to gather people and make money.
“There’s this whole creator economy of people who want to bring people together in person,” Dunn added.
With its Series A capital, Pie is rolling out a creator fund for event hosts, which pays $5 to the creator for every RSVP to an event (all of which are free for attendees).
The startup plans to experiment with different monetization models, eyeing a potential freemium model that apps like Bumble and Hinge have opted for.
“This is venture-backed startups,” Dunn said, adding that by the time of Pie’s Series B, it will have a monetization engine locked down. “You have costs, and then you figure out revenues later.”
In the meantime, Dunn is betting on Pie’s Gen-Z staff and the app’s user growth, which stands at 40% month-over-month.
Read the 31-page pitch deck that Andy Dunn used to raise Pie’s Series A:
Note: Pie has redacted details and amended some pages so that the document could be shared externally.
