Andy Dunn’s new app Pie uses AI to help you make friends

“We’re a long way from pants,” Andy Dunn, founder of online fashion retailer Bonobos, told TechCrunch. Now, the former CEO is taking on a completely different challenge: he wants to help people make friends. Dunn’s newest venture, Pie, is a social app focused on bringing people together in real life. With an $11.5 million Series A raise and the funds to pay organizers to host events, Pie has grown to over 130,000 monthly active users, despite only being available in San Francisco and Chicago. But more users meant that the in-person events hosted through the app were also getting more crowded, making it harder for people to connect. The young company was faced with a problem: if hundreds of people show up to an event, how do guests know who to talk to? How can they make friends when they walk into a busy room, surrounded by strangers? “This is the beauty of building a startup,” Dunn said. “A solution creates a problem.” Luckily, a possible fix for this problem wasn’t hard to find. ... Read full article.