As the world faces a loneliness crisis, two Georgia-based founders are hoping their new app can help address the widening disconnect between people.

And they’ve raised US$1.65mil pre-seed round to do it, the company announced recently.

“We don’t think technology can solve loneliness,” said Maya Watson, CEO and co-founder of Why?! “We don’t have this, like, lofty view that somehow, we’re going to be the ones to save everything. What we’re trying to do is just focus on closeness.”

Decatur-based Watson and Lexi Nisita, who lives in Athens, founded the company in April 2023 after years at Netflix and social conversation app Clubhouse.

The result is Why?!, an app that fosters conversations between users. It works in two main ways: by positing questions like “What’s the most adorable thing someone has ever done for you?” to its general user base to prompt discussions, and by creating private conversations for friends new and old to get to know each other better.

Those private questions - called Journeys - can also be used face-to-face with people in a sort of digital card set.

The app’s name is meant to represent its mission, getting to know somebody better.

Why is “the most fundamental question,” Nisita said. “It’s also one of those questions that the more you ask it, the deeper it goes.”

Watson views the app as a sort of “social scaffolding” and the relationship between people as a building.

“Scaffolding is used in like construction and renovation, it’s not the actual building. It’s the thing that helps support the building,” she said.

Watson and Nisita closed their pre-seed round in April this year after about eight months of fundraising. Investors included San Francisco-based Precursor Ventures, which has also invested in Atlanta-based Goodr, and Mohammad Almalkawi, chief technology officer of Clubhouse.

They started raising in a particularly difficult environment; North American investments declined 37% in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to data firm Crunchbase.

And investors are more focused right now on artificial intelligence-driven technology, not as much in consumer products, like Why?!, Crunchbase reported. But Watson and Nisita decided incorporating AI at this point doesn’t align with what they’re trying to create.

“You can’t do the work for people of getting to know someone and getting to be close with somebody else,” Nisita said.

All the app’s prompts are being curated by people who are “curious for a living” and are good writers, Watson said, so they get the right type and tone of questions to foster connection.

The app is currently in beta testing, but Watson and Nisita hope to start slowly releasing it through invitations in the fall.

The pre-seed funding will go to hiring more engineers and taking the app to market. They plan to do a series of intimate, in-person events across the country where people host a group at their house or over dinner and go through a specialised journey of questions

 - TNS