One Friday evening, Alyx van der Vorm couldn’t stop thinking, “I should do something with someone.”
But she found herself alone once again on a Friday night, thinking about just heading to the gym. That was when she realized that trying to make plans with people these days is incredibly hard.
“Figuring out who’s around, texting, waiting, researching options… It felt absurd that staying home and watching a movie was one tap, but seeing a friend was ten steps,” van der Vorm said.
At 25 years old, van der Vorm is very much Generation Z, that overly-connected demographic that somehow also self-reports as feeling overwhelmingly isolated and lonely. Van der Vorm studied computational neuroscience at Harvard University, and later worked at a lab where she studied how social connections impact mental and physical health.
“The data is stark. Isolation can be as physically damaging as things we universally agree are bad for us,” she said. “That gave me the confidence that working on friendship isn’t ‘soft.’ It’s a real health problem.”
So in 2020, van der Vorm started working on Clyx, a social platform that helps users find community events to join. Five years later, the app today has 50,000 active users buying tickets for events, and more than 200,000 users browsing events. The company has now raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Blitzscaling Ventures, with participation from other investors, including Iqram Magdon-Ismail, the co-founder of Venmo, and F1-driver-turned-investor Nico Rosberg.
Alyx van der Vorm
Clyx itself is quite simple: It pulls event data from sites such as Ticketmaster and TikTok, and shows its users events in their cities that they can sign up for. It also offers suggestions for places to try, and users can upload their contacts to the app to see which events their friends are going to.
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The company has also built a compatibility engine that recommends people users can connect with at events. “So instead of walking into a room of strangers, you walk in already knowing, ‘Hey, Thomas is into the same things I am, we should connect,” van der Vorm said.
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