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.
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.
The app even nudges people to connect and reconnect, which van der Vorm says, takes away “the awkward burden of reaching out cold,” or alleviates what some might perceive as the tedious task of nurturing a new friendship. Clyx also has a feature called Programs, essentially a series of events that leads people to hang out with the same group of people while at workshop sessions.
“That repetition is where acquaintances turn into real friends, and it’s been one of the most exciting things we’ve rolled out,” van der Vorm said.
“People do have friends,” she continued. “What they lack are friends who are nearby, free at the same time, and up for the same things. We remove the planning tax and nudge the right next step so the momentum doesn’t die after ‘we should hang soon.’”
Van der Vorm told TechCrunch she met her lead investors through personal connections, including through a chance meeting with a stranger at a coffee shop who connected her with an investor friend.
She met Magdon-Ismail, the co-founder of Venmo, after someone heard her give a talk at the Harvard Club and thought the two should meet. To hear van der Vorm speak of this, it seems to be a case of “right place, right time.”
“Simon Sinek was another,” she said. “Someone heard me speak about friendship, said I sounded just like him, and made the intro.”
Clyx is currently operating only in Miami and London, and van der Vorm aims to launch the app in New York this month, and in Sao Paulo this year. The company is also investing heavily in product development, brand and cultural partnerships, and, of course, expanding its team.
Clyx isn’t the first app to try to help people get outside and meet new folk. Posh, Meetup, Dice, and even Eventbrite have done that for years; Bumble has an option to look for friends, and even Hinge is trying to get people to go outside more. But van der Vorm hopes Clyx can stand out.
“My dream is to create a world where it’s easy to go out and spend time with your friends as it is to sit home and scroll,” she said. “And if that helps people feel happier, healthier, and like they truly belong somewhere — that’s the impact I want Clyx to have.”
