XSeed Capital is very excited to announce our recent investment in Chatous, an online and mobile service that enables people to have conversations with others around the world in a safe, private and protected manner. The company, which began as a project in one of Jure Leskovec‘s classes at Stanford University, matches individuals with others based upon actual chatting behavior. Today Chatous shared news that its users have sent over 2 billion messages through the platform. Over 3 million people worldwide have downloaded the app, with over 1 million signing up in the last three weeks.
When we first discovered the team we were drawn to the opportunity for three key reasons:
1. For over 30 years we have witnessed people developing casual, online connections going back to the Well, America Online and the latest set of conferencing/chatting applications on mobile devices, in web browsers, etc. The notion of connecting with both known and new people is a behavior that is consistently indulged by humans when technology enables new forms of communication.
2. The technology of Chatous creates a unique opportunity to match individuals with like-minded people, thus creating an incredibly compelling and sticky application for users. The growth rate of the product’s usage, and the time spent on the application, has been hugely impressive.
3. Parth and the team were incredibly mindful about how they wanted to grow their business. This was a great instance of finding bright entrepreneurs who were very authentic to their product and market.
We initially funded the company with a small pre-seed investment, and are very excited to have participated meaningfully with our co-investors General Catalyst Partners in the company’s larger first round.
We look forward to helping the Chatous team build an exciting and large business!