The idea arrived, as the best ones often do, in a moment of nothing to do. Alyx van der Vorm was in her Harvard dorm room, her friends scattered out of town, an empty evening stretching ahead of her. She could summon dinner to her door in minutes or cue up any film ever made, but the one thing she wanted, a plan, a reason to leave the room, a nudge toward another person, was the single thing no app could give her. That absence became the premise of Clyx, the friendship app that in September 2025 raised fourteen million dollars in Series A funding, and it explains why van der Vorm, now twenty-five, talks about loneliness less as a mood than as a design problem waiting to be solved.
Clyx does something quietly radical for a generation raised on the infinite scroll: it points users outward. The app surfaces events happening nearby, pulling from sources as varied as Ticketmaster and TikTok, and shows you which ones your friends already want to attend. A yoga class, a language exchange, a concert two neighborhoods over becomes not an abstraction but an invitation with a name attached to it. “It was just a matter of time until someone built something that could tell me, this is a yoga class your friend wants to go to, you should really go with her tonight,” van der Vorm told Business Insider, and the specificity of that vision is the whole point. She is not trying to build another feed. She is trying to dismantle what she calls the planning tax, the low-grade friction that kills so many friendships in the gap between “we should hang out soon” and actually doing it.
Founded in 2020, Clyx made its debut in Miami in 2022 before crossing the Atlantic to London in 2023. The traction has been real rather than theoretical: roughly fifty thousand active users signing up for events, and another two hundred thousand browsing what is on offer. In September, the company set its sights on New York and São Paulo, backed by the fresh capital and a suite of new features. The heart of the product, van der Vorm insists, is not the events listing but the intelligence underneath it. “Our most valuable tech is our matchmaking AI,” she has said, describing an ability to predict not just what you would enjoy but who you would enjoy it with.
The raise itself reads like a case study in the very thesis Clyx is built on. The round was led by Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling Ventures, with participation from Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail and the Formula One world champion turned investor Nico Rosberg, a lineup that lends the company a certain gravitational pull. And van der Vorm has been candid that she found her lead investors the old-fashioned way, through people, including a chance encounter with a stranger at a coffee shop who connected her to an investor friend. It is a fitting origin for a founder whose entire product is a bet that the most valuable connections still happen in person.
Clyx enters a crowded field. Meetup, Posh, Dice, and Eventbrite have long tried to coax people off their couches, and even the dating platforms have pivoted toward friendship, with Bumble offering a friend-finding mode and Hinge nudging its users toward the outdoors. What sets van der Vorm apart is less the category than the conviction, the sense that she is solving a problem she has personally felt. Loneliness among young adults has reached what public health researchers increasingly describe as epidemic levels, and van der Vorm frames her company as a direct response to it rather than a lifestyle accessory. “My dream is to create a world where it’s as 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,” the rest, she suggests, follows on its own.
