When Alyx Van der Vorm, founder of the friendship app Clyx, was studying neuroscience at Harvard University, the U.K. native found there was a “planning tax” if she wanted to go out on a Friday with friends.

“I’d need to figure out who was on campus and text five people to see if they wanted to do something,” she explains. “I knew the next request from them would be, ‘Sure, what do you want to do?’ I would then have to go and research things happening in Boston. Is there a film on tonight? Is there a DJ at a bar?”

Sometimes, when that seemed like too much work, she would put on Netflix instead. When she noticed a statistic showing that young people are spending dramatically less time socializing than in the past, she realized she was not alone decided to do something to make it easier to get together.

She tapped the skills she’d developed in a double major in computer science to vibe code the Clyx app, which uses an algorithm to connect users to potential friends who share their interests, bringing them together via group activities such a yoga, language exchanges, board game nights and art classes, where they meet IRL, or in real life.

“It's our goal to make it as easy to go out and spend time with like-minded friends as it is to stay at home,” she says. “And for many people that often means new friends.”

Van der Vorm started coding the app in November 2020 as a solo founder and took it full time after earning her BA in 2022. She launched Clyx on the app store in 2023. With about 500,000 active monthly members in cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, London and Sao Paolo, the free app brought in $1.4 million in revenue in 2025, with eight full-time employees, making money through partnerships with brands seeking to engage active communities.

Clyx, based in Miami, raised a $14 million funding round in September 2025, backed by Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling Ventures, Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, F1 World Champion Nico Rosber and Simon Sinek. Van der Worm was approached by a close associate of Hoffman after she spoke at a conference on how she considers oxytocin in her friendship-promoting algorithm. The app is now expanding in fast-growing markets such as San Diego and Austin, and working on launches in Nashville and Chicago.

How the loneliness epidemic is shaping a generation

At an age many young adults wish they were having more fun, they discover friendship can be hard to find.

An eight-country study released this year by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis School of Public Health, found that nearly half of young adults ages 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely, compared to 4 out of 10 adults in general. The study found a strong association between loneliness and depression and anxiety.

Young adults ages 18 to 29 now spend 5.1 hours a week socializing, up from a low of 4.2 hours in 2020, during the pandemic, but still dramatically lower than the 12.8 hours in 2010, according to the Institute for Family Studies , in an analysis of the American Time Use Survey.

The pandemic was a catalyst for the isolation but so was increasing use of social media and technology, experts say. By 2023, the World Health Organization declared that loneliness was an international health concern and launched a commission to strengthen social connection. In 2025, the WHO Commission on Social Connection issued “From Loneliness to Social Connection,” a report advocating strategies such as community activities that bring people together.

The growth of “friendship tech”

Clyx is part of a small but growing “friendship tech” sector aiming to offer solutions. The dating app Bumble introduced Bumble BFF , which allows users seeking platonic friends to post profiles and swipe right to start chatting, in 2016, spinning it out as a separate Bumble for Friends app in September 2025 and then relaunching the free app as BFF on a new tech stack. “With feelings of loneliness and isolation at an all-time high, now more than ever is a time to prioritize self-love and friendships for our wellbeing,” said Whitney Wolf Herd, co-founder and CEO of Bumble, in a statement when the app was introduced.

RealRoots, founded in 2024, raised a $500,000 funding round in September 2025 for its app-based friendship matching service, but has a paid model. It charges $289 to cover six weeks of curated, in-person activities where members can meet. “I started working on RealRoots because this was the product I desperately needed so many times in my own life,” said CEO and Co-founder Dorothy Li, a graduate of Stanford Business School, on the startup’s profile at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator.

At Clyx, the vast majority of users are 18- to 35-year-old college graduates in their first or second job after college, often living in a new city. Most are women.

Clyx’s research has found that its users are more likely to become friends if they meet within 10 days of an initial connection, so it is designed to foster that. A former spinning instructor, Van der Vorn remembered how small technological nudges showing a friend had registered for tomorrow’s class would motivate students, and the app includes a similar feature.

To ensure safety, the app has extensive verifications to make sure each profile is for a real human, and that all events have a host, known as a “community leader,” coordinating the attendees, she says. “They’re never meeting one-on-one with someone,” says Van der Vorn. The app also sends follow-up surveys to make sure someone had a good experience and allows organizers to flag attendees who behave inappropriately.

Applying machine learning to friendships

One thing that guided Van der Vorn in developing the app was the concept of deep neural networks, the subject of her thesis at Harvard. These are artificial neural networks with multiple hidden layers. They can spot patterns in large amounts of data.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, if deep neural nets, which essentially mimic the brain and how we compute things, can make cars drive without a driver, they must be able one day to predict exactly who I would like to hang out most with on campus and what we should do together,’” Van der Vorn says. She concluded that the company’s success would come down to its ability to accurately predict what users want to do and with whom.

Jack Einhorn, a Miami-based investor heard about the app from her professors while she was developing it and invested $25,000 in seed money. Formerly the founder of Fancy, a social ecommerce platform, he suggested testing it at Miami Tech Month, an event that proved to be pivotal to her learning.

Van der Vorm reached out to the organization with the idea of using the app bring the attendees together. She bought herself a plane ticket there using money she’d saved from a job at a bank before college. Miami Tech Month promoted Clyx in its newsletter, raising the app’s profile. Within six days, she says, she had listed 6,000 events.

Van der Vorn spent a week interviewing users after that experiment. One of her most significant discoveries was that they were not just using Clyx to meet their friends. They were using it to meet new friends.

“For me, that was one of the big unlocks of our company to date,” she says. “I realized most people have a best friend they can call somewhere in the world. But that's very different to having a friend routinely, recurringly who lives in the same area as you that has the same schedule and is free to do the same thing and wants to. That’s really when Clyx’ mission was crystallized.”

Although Van der Vorm was able to code the initial version of the app, she realized along the way that she needed to create a better user experience as she scaled it. She used her seed money to fund a coder and a UX designer about nine months into her operations.

As Clyx took off, Van der Vorn realized that even though event hosts get to keep 100% of the proceeds of their gatherings, many were investing more than they received once they counted extras they bought, like cupcakes or painting supplies. Some were solopreneurs who couldn’t afford to do that sustainably.

That led Clyx to invest $3 million in developing a B2B platform that connects brands with event hosts. Sponsors from such as Lululemon pay the hosts $1,000 per event.

“The reason for this is to try and help them make more money, be sustainable entrepreneurs, so that their passion is something they can actually keep doing without having to stress about it.”

The app now counts 1 million friendships formed among its users. Some have shared their loneliness prior to using it. Van der Vorn was at a coffee shop in Miami when a young woman, new to the city, came up to her. “I’ve been saying to my mom ‘I just want to go home,” the woman shared. She decided to give the city another chance after downloading the app and started going to exercise classes where she started meeting like-minded women. “I made my best friend group here,” she told Van der Vorn.

While Van der Horn likes seeing new friendships lighting up the company’s dashboards, she says it’s the one-on-one encounters like this that keep her going. “That makes everything feel worth it," she says.