IRL is a new social network taking on Facebook groups

IRL, a young social network, has been quietly growing over the past year and just attracted an eye-popping amount of money to take on Facebook. The Social calendar App has since been building a messaging-based social network, or what its founder, Abraham Shafi, calls a “WeChat of the West.” 

Last fall, the company announced $16 million in Series B funding and the expansion of its social calendaring app to colleges. “The new round,” according to a Techcrunch’s report in September last year, “was led by Goodwater Capital with participation from Founders Fund, Floodgate and Raine, and comes on top of the $11 million IRL had previously raised, including its $8 million Series A last year.” 

In February 2021, it launched a new website that adds more social features around events, including profiles, chats and the ability to join group events, among other things. With these changes, the over 10M monthly users will be able to receive personalised event recommendations, participate in group events, as well as talk about events with their friends, across both web and mobile.

The two-year-old startup has announced a sizable $170 million Series C growth round to fuel its mission to help people “Do more together.” The idea has attracted the deep pockets of the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, which is the biggest investor in the new $170 million round of funding that values IRL at roughly $1 billion. 

That’s a remarkable amount of money for an app that has over 12 million monthly users and no revenue. Even still, IRL is looking for early traction primarily with people under the age of 18 in the United States, and the app has already facilitated more than 1 billion messages in barely a year. The Verge’s findings showed that a handful of universities now let students enter their school emails to gain access to virtual events and group chats.

In an interview with The Verge, IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi said, “We’re building Facebook groups and events for the generation that doesn’t use Facebook. There just happens to be no other product really focused on this space for the next generation.” 

The Company wants to allow groups to charge for access to for things like tutoring or music lessons, though it hasn’t rolled the feature out broadly. Eventually, it plans to also let brands promote events on its main discovery page.

According to Shafi, the goal is to become “a super messaging social network” over time. “We have the opportunity to build WeChat for the rest of the world,” he said in reference to the messaging app that over 1 billion people use in China to do everything from pay bills to hail taxis. “The combination of messaging and events creates the conditions for a platform,” said the venture capitalist Mike Maples, an IRL board member and investor who was also an early backer of Twitter.

For now, the vast majority of IRL’s users are teenagers that live in middle America, but Shafi plans to use SoftBank’s money to help grow in other countries. Besides paying some creators on TikTok to promote their IRL chats early on, the startup hasn’t spent money on marketing. Instead, it’s finding new users in apps where young people are already spending time, like Snapchat, Roblox, and TikTok — the latter of which is also working on a product integration with IRL. (SoftBank’s only other known investment in the social media industry is ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.)

As part of this fundraiser, IRL is setting up a creator fund that will pay people to organize events in major cities using its app, like an outdoor movie night or a block party. Up to $100,000 in grant money will be earmarked for each city in the application program, which will start in the US this year and move to other countries sometime in 2022. The initiative is application only and IRL hasn’t specified the list of cities yet.