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The Venture Codex

Fizz

480 S California Ave, Ste 301, Palo Alto, CA, 94306, United States

Overview

Fizz is a two-year-old social network that launched at Stanford and centers on anonymous, campus-specific posting with upvotes/downvotes, a karma system, and visible "fizzfluence" metrics. The app originally invited users via Stanford email addresses and has expanded to more than 80 college campuses, with a stated goal of reaching 250 schools by year-end. Its core product emphasizes local, real-time campus conversation and community discovery, with moderation handled largely by volunteer student moderators. The company is testing product extensions including an online marketplace for students and has discussed adding job listings; a prominent, unnamed executive is slated to join as chief product officer next month. Fizz’s business model is described as a "work in progress," and executives acknowledge monetization is a current focus. The platform has faced content-moderation challenges and a 2021 privacy breach; company leaders say security practices have since evolved. Financially, Fizz has attracted venture funding to support growth while it refines product and moderation practices. Fizz is a college-only anonymous social app that gives each campus its own community where students can publish text posts, polls and photos without usernames and classmates can upvote or downvote content. Users can DM each other and choose to reveal their identities; the app is currently iPhone-only. Fizz launched on 13 campuses and expanded to 25 in under two months, and it reports 95% penetration among iPhone users on campuses like Stanford, Dartmouth, Pepperdine and Bethune-Cookman. The company says over half of its users engage with the app daily. Fizz has grown from a two-person founding team to about 25 employees and closed a $4.5M seed in June followed by a $12M Series A; it aims to reach 1,000 campuses by the end of 2023. The app experienced a November 2021 security vulnerability that exposed identifying data and PII; Fizz says it fixed the issue within 24 hours, moved PII to a separate secure database, notified users, and has since evolved its security practices. Fizz is an anonymous, campus-restricted social app built by and for college students that supports anonymous text posts, polls, photos and direct messages. Access is limited to students with a valid .edu address and each campus has its own community. The company supplements AI screening with paid peer moderators — about 15 per school — and reports posts are removed within less than a minute on average. Fizz says it has very high adoption in some places (95% of Stanford undergrads have downloaded the app; 70% at Rice) and estimates 50–60% of users on a given campus use the platform daily. The startup is not currently monetizing but has considered a marketplace for student-to-student sales (textbooks, bikes, etc.). Fizz operates with 22 full‑time employees out of a house in Palo Alto and plans to expand to more than 1,000 U.S. campuses by the end of next year.

Total raised
$42M
Funding rounds
3
Latest round
Series B
Latest activity
Aug 2023

Industries

  • Communities
  • Consumer Software
  • Education
  • Social Media
  • Social Network
  • Software
  • Universities
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Recent funding

  1. Series B

    Aug 2023

    $25M

  2. Series A

    Nov 2022

    $12M

  3. Seed

    Oct 2022

    $5M

Team