Real-Life Social Startup Buddy Raises $1.1M In Funding

Los Angeles-based startup Buddy has announced a $1.1 million pre-seed funding round to support its innovative social utility app, which is designed to encourage real-life social interactions rather than prolonged screen time. Buddy’s funding comes from prominent gaming figures, including Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer at Saber Interactive, and Vince Zampella, co-founder of Respawn Entertainment. The company also gains strategic guidance from Dennis Fong, the first professional gamer and CEO of GGWP, who joins Buddy as an advisor.

Buddy’s app, which entered beta testing in May, aims to redefine social networking for Gen Z by merging digital and physical experiences. The platform promises a proprietary “mesh” technology that would allow for connections without using data or wi-fi. Unlike most conventional social platforms, Buddy has no public profiles or posts, keeping everything location-based and real-time.

The idea is to encourage more social interaction in person, with users having to share their authentic self in the moment rather than creating an online persona for a larger-scale app. As a location-based service, it encourages spur-of-the-moment interactions, but also aims to have private features for communicating with friends.

Co-founders Claire Wright, Logan Nguyen, and Ryh-Ming Poon bring extensive experience from Fortune 500 companies in entertainment and technology, and have clearly been putting effort into constructing a social platform that does something different from most startups. Buddy’s waitlist is now open to users ahead of its full launch in 2025, although not much information is available about what the launch will be – or how many users are expected to be on the waitlist by the time the app opens.