One Friday evening Alyx van der vorm couldn’t stop pondering: “I should do something with someone.”
But once again she found herself on Friday evening, pondering that they were going to the gym. Then she realized that attempting to plan with people nowadays is extremely difficult.
“Thinking who is nearby, writes, waiting, studying the options … It was absurd that he would stay at home and watching the movie was one touch, but seeing a friend there were ten steps,” said Van der vorm.
At the age of 25, Van der Vorm is very generations with, which excessively connected the demographic group, which in some way also reports as normally isolated and lonely. Van der Vorm studied computing neuronauk at Harvard University, and later worked in a laboratory in which she studied how social connections affect mental and physical health.
“The data is clear. Insulation can be just as physically harmful as what we commonly agree, they are bad for us,” she said. “It made me sure that working on friendship is not” soft “. This is a real health problem. ”
So in 2020, Van der vorm began working ClyxA social platform that helps users find social events to connect. Five years later, the application today has 50,000 energetic users buying tickets for events and over 200,000 users browsing events. The company has now collected $ 14 million in the A series of series A managed by Blitzscaling Ventures, with the participation of other investors, including IQRAM Magdon-Iimail, co-founder of Venmo and Nico Rosberg’s F1-Flyer undeniable.
Clyx itself is quite easy: it downloads data from sites equivalent to Ticketmaster and Tiktok and shows users’ events in their cities that they will register for. It also offers suggestions for places to try, and users can send their contacts to the application to see what events their friends are going.
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The company also built a compatibility engine that recommends that users can connect during events. “So instead of entering a stranger’s room, you already enter knowing:” Hey, Thomas is in the same things as I’m; we should always connect, “said Van der vorm.
The application is even looking for people to attach and re -connect, which based on Van der vorm removes “awkward weight of cold achievement” or soothes what some can see as a tedious task of nurturing a recent friendship. Clyx also has a function called programs, principally a series of events that lead people to spend time with the same group of people during workshop sessions.
“This repetition is a place where friends turn into real friends and it was one of the most exciting things we introduced,” said Van der Vorm.
“People have friends,” she continued. “They lack friends who are nearby, free at the same time and for the same things. We remove the planning tax and poke the right next step so that the rush does not die after” we should always hang “soon”.
Van der Vorm told Techcrunch that she met her major investors through personal connections, including during a accidental meeting with a stranger in a cafe who combined her with a friend an investor.
She met Magdon-Iimail after someone heard how she was speaking in the Harvard club and thought they need to each meet. Hearing Van der Vorm says about it, plainly this is a case of “the right place, the right time.”
“Simon Sinek was another one,” she said. “Someone heard me talking about friendship, said that I sounded like him and I made an introduction.”
Clyx currently operates only in Miami and London, and Van Der Vorm is aimed at launching the application in New York this month and in Sao Paulo this yr. The company also invests in the development of products, brand and culture partnerships and, of course, expanding its team.
Clyx is not the first application that tries to assist people go outside and meet recent people. Posh, meeting, bones and even Eventbrite have been doing it for years; Bumble has the opportunity to look for friends, and even a hinge tries to encourage people to go outside. But Van der Vorm hopes that Clyx can stand out.
“My dream is to create a world in which it is easy to go out and spend time with friends, how to sit at home and change,” she said. “And if it helps people feel happier, healthier and as if they really belonged somewhere – it’s the impact of Clyx.”