Showcase: Bonobos co-founder’s IRL social startup cake raises $11.5 million

• IRL social startup Pie has raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures.
• Founded by Andy Dunn of Bonobos, Pie focuses on personal connections and events.
• Pie plans to use the funds to support event creators and expand into other markets.

Startups creating social networks are abandoning online friends and followers in favor of personal, real connections.

Pie, a Chicago-based startup founded by Andy Dunn of menswear brand Bonobos, is joining the race to help people make friends.

Pie, one of many new “IRL social” apps, allows users to schedule and join IRL meetings. The application is already equipped with an AI assistant and is in the pilot phase of its enterprise product offering.

“The fight for offline attention is the next big thing for consumers,” Dunn told Business Insider.

Amid a loneliness epidemic declared by US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and social media users bored with life online, startups like Posh (a type of TikTok event channel) and 222 (a way to meet strangers over dinner or events) in they also raised venture capital this year through apps aimed at helping people find friends.

Pie recently announced it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures. Origin Ventures from Chicago and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams also participated in the round. In the latest round, Pie’s total capital raised for the company is $24 million.

Creating and developing applications for making friends

Like many startups, Pie had to change. It launched in 2020 as a matchmaking app similar to Bumble Friends.

“We did a lot of matching, a lot of profile browsing, but no one wanted to contact the other person,” Dunn said.

After reading Dr. Marisa Fanco’s book “Platonic,” Dunn said he went back to the drawing board. Scrolling through potential friends didn’t do the trick – it had to be regular group meetings to help people meet and stay connected.

With a team of 10 Chicago employees, Pie has doubled down on building IRL apps and using the city as a testing ground.

“Chicago doesn’t have the saturation of consumer apps that you find in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco,” Dunn said.

In February and March, the startup began testing local, curated events called “Pie Originals” in Chicago, such as a monthly silent book club and bimonthly “Dudes Getting Pancakes.” Dunn attributes the app’s development to this strategy. Within six months of testing, Pie Originals reached 20,000 monthly active users.

Local event creators like Mary Doctor, who organizes a show-and-tell event for adults, have used Pie to bring people together and make money.

“There is a whole creator economy of people who want to connect people personally,” Dunn added.

With Series A capital, Pie is providing a Creator Fund for event hosts, where a creator receives $5 for each event response (all of which is free to attendees).

The startup plans to experiment with different monetization models, looking at a potential freemium model that apps like Bumble and Hinge have opted for.

“These are venture-backed startups,” Dunn said, adding that until Pie’s Series B is released, the monetization mechanism will be disabled. “You have costs and then you calculate revenues.”

Meanwhile, Dunn is banking on Pie’s Gen Z staff and the app’s user growth of 40% month over month.

Read the 31-page presentation Andy Dunn used to create the A Pie series:

Note: Pie has edited details and corrected some pages so that the document can be shared externally.