Pie is a social app that makes it easy for friends to connect in real life. The company recently announced it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding, led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Renegade Partners, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, and others. With this funding round, the company has raised $24 million.
Andy Dunn founded the company. Dunn had co-founded the menswear brand Bonobos and served as CEO until its acquisition by Walmart in 2017. As an angel investor and VC investor at Red Swan Ventures, Dunn has backed more than 120 startups, including Warby Parker and Coinbase. And last year, he released a memoir titled Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, which explores the intersection of entrepreneurship and mental illness. Dunn also discussed his hidden journey with bipolar disorder in a 2023 TED Talk (Lessons from Losing My Mind).
Dunn was inspired by this idea when moving from NYC to Chicago mid-pandemic and leaving behind many friends in the process.
“I lost myself in Slack chats, Zoom calls, Google docs, Uber Eats, Netflix, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Chess.com. My family life was vibrant, but my professional and personal social life were nil. I replaced that vacuum with screens,” said Dunn in a Substack post. “It took two years for me to realize that while my family life was filled to the brim with two forms of Greek love: eros (romantic love) and storge (parent/child love), I was missing two others kinds of love: philia (platonic love) and agape (love of the tribe). My cup was half empty. In short, I missed having a tribe, and I missed having friends. I felt frozen in amber, caught between two worlds: my life before the pandemic, and my new permanently altered, digitally-addicted reality.”
Williams invested $5.3 million in Pie and also played a major role in Pie’s product development while also offering day-to-day support to Dunn. This is Williams’ largest investment outside of the companies he founded.
