A 25-year-old Harvard neuroscience grad just landed $14 million to solve what she calls the "planning tax" - the exhausting process of making plans with friends. Clyx's Series A round signals investors are betting big on solutions to Gen Z's loneliness epidemic, with the app already connecting 50,000 active users to real-world events across Miami and London.
Clyx founder Alyx van der Vorm was having another lonely Friday night when the lightbulb went off. "Staying home and watching a movie was one tap, but seeing a friend was ten steps," the 25-year-old told TechCrunch. That frustration just turned into a $14 million Series A round.
The funding, led by Blitzscaling Ventures with participation from Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail and F1 driver-turned-investor Nico Rosberg, validates what van der Vorm discovered during her computational neuroscience studies at Harvard: loneliness isn't just an emotional problem, it's a health crisis.
"The data is stark. Isolation can be as physically damaging as things we universally agree are bad for us," van der Vorm explained. Her research into how social connections impact mental and physical health convinced her that "working on friendship isn't 'soft' - it's a real health problem."
[embedded image: Alyx van der Vorm headshot]
Clyx's approach is deceptively simple but potentially game-changing. The platform pulls event data from Ticketmaster and TikTok, then uses what the company calls a "compatibility engine" to match users with both events and potential friends. "Instead of walking into a room of strangers, you walk in already knowing, 'Hey, Thomas is into the same things I am, we should connect,'" van der Vorm said.
The numbers suggest Gen Z is hungry for this solution. Five years after launch, Clyx now has 50,000 active users buying tickets for events, with more than 200,000 users browsing events across Miami and London. But van der Vorm thinks the real magic happens in something called Programs - recurring events that let the same group of people meet repeatedly.
"That repetition is where acquaintances turn into real friends, and it's been one of the most exciting things we've rolled out," she said. The feature tackles what researchers call the "mere exposure effect" - people become friends through repeated positive interactions, not just one-off meetups.
The funding story itself reads like a Clyx success story. Van der Vorm met her investors through the kind of serendipitous connections her app tries to facilitate - a chance coffee shop encounter, a Harvard Club talk, even a comparison to motivational speaker Simon Sinek that led to an introduction.
