- IRL (In Real Life) — the leading social calendar and event discovery platform that brings people together over shared experiences — announced that it has raised $16 million in funding
IRL (In Real Life) — the leading social calendar and event discovery platform that brings people together over shared experiences — announced that it has raised $16 million in Series B funding led by Goodwater Capital with participation from Founders Fund, Floodgate, and Raine.
The social calendar app has gained attention from early investors in Facebook, Snap, and Zynga for its platform, diverse offering, and mission of deepening connections between people despite the COVID-19 pandemic. And the new funding will be utilized to build out IRL’s web product and expand the platform beyond the U.S.
Along with the Series B Round, IRL has launched its college network starting with 100 colleges and universities across North America, including USC, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and several others. IRL’s college calendars are monitored and updated by student ambassadors and they help students follow activities and organize events with friends.
Students are able to register with a verified school email address and are granted access to the virtual campus calendar with events for every major, club, or interest. IRL also launched a new Groups feature for all users, allowing friends to create specific groups to share, discuss, and RSVP to events together.
The funding announcement comes on the heels of a period of major growth for IRL — which has seen 10x growth in daily active users and 300 million hours in “Time Together” since they launched last June.
With a mission of getting users off the app and engaging with friends in real or remote life, IRL created a new metric called “Time Together” to measure how many hours users are attending events they RSVP’d to on IRL. And an increasing variety of brands, including TikTok, SoundCloud, and HBO have partnered with IRL to expand their own outreach and awareness around events, programs, premieres, etc.
KEY QUOTES:
“IRL is the only social platform that helps users find the best ways to spend their time and actually encourages them to get off the platform. Colleges and universities, in particular, need a way to build and foster a sense of community, whether their students are away from campus remote learning or on campus practicing hybrid learning. We’ve already seen a great response from students using IRL to manage events on campus. This new funding will allow us to expand IRL’s platform, help students create lasting memories and friendships through shared experiences, and look towards international markets.”
— Abraham Shafi, Founder and CEO of IRL
“We believe IRL will grow to become one of the major social networks powering communities on the Internet and in the real world. IRL delivers on the promise to make social media less isolating, by helping drive authentic connection between friends and family around events they care about.”
— Chi-Hua Chien Managing Partner at Goodwater Capital
“IRL has been an amazing platform for us to engage with more of our audience and meet new potential users. The Weeknd Experience: TikTok Live was our first virtual concert experience and we added the event on IRL to grow visibility. IRL was seamless to work with and successfully helped us gauge early interest with 52K RSVPs and 1.1M followers on our profile in the week leading up to the concert. We see major traffic coming from IRL and are excited to continue our partnership!”
— Jenny Zhu, Head of Integrated Marketing U.S. at TikTok
