Twine began as a video-chat startup and shifted to focus on online events, offering small-group professional networking tools for event owners. The product drops a handful of event attendees into intimate video chats (the team notes chats over five people become webinars) to recreate elevator‑ or lobby‑style serendipity. Event hosts can embed Twine or link out to it; there is a free tier for events up to 30 users and paid packs sold on a per-attendee SaaS basis. Feature set includes digital business-card exchanges, analytics and reports for hosts and attendees. Customers include Microsoft, Amazon and Forrester, and Twine has about 25 customers with some running 10–15 events; the company was on track for $1 million in bookings in 2021. The co-founders come from DoubleDutch, and Twine plans to hire in sales and customer success, improve accessibility, expand the platform and experiment with asynchronous matchmaking. twine is a group video chat app that matches users into digital gatherings where each participant has four 1-to-1 conversations of eight minutes apiece, for a total 40-minute session. Participants choose from a library of more than 250 'deep' questions and are matched with others who want to explore the same topics. The app is available on iOS and web and is currently in private beta with a waitlist of around 1,000 users, mainly from New York City and San Francisco. twine requires pre-approval to join, collects email/phone/ZIP at onboarding, asks users to rate conversations, and enforces permanent bans to deter trolling; the company says it aims to move toward real-ID-only access in the future. The startup has closed $1.4 million in seed funding and plans to adopt a subscription model and resume real-life gatherings when it is safe to do so. The founders position twine as a way to skip small talk and foster deeper friendships rather than dating, aiming to address loneliness exacerbated by social distancing.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Jun 2021