Meet5 wants to help Gen X and baby boomers make more friends.
Its app is focused on users over 40 who want to meet new people in their area with in-real-life (IRL) group activities such as concerts, yoga, hiking, or dancing.
While anyone over 18 can technically join the app, the average age on Meet5 is 57, CEO Lukas Reinhardt told Business Insider.
Reinhardt said some of Meet5’s customers want to “feel young again,” especially those whose children have moved out of the house.
“Finally, they have time for themselves again,” Reinhardt said. “They want to do stuff they didn’t do for 20, 30 years.”
The Frankfurt, Germany-based company expanded its app to the US this summer and exclusively told BI that it raised a €8 million (roughly $9 million USD) Series A investment from European venture capital firm Peak to help it do so.
Meet5 isn’t the only friendship app raising capital and trying to help connect people in group settings. Competitors such as apps that match strangers and put them in groups like 222 and Timeleft, or local-events platform Pie, have launched in the past few years, and there are older mainstays in the space like Meetup.
Reinhardt believes that Meet5’s focus on older users and community will set it apart from the friendship apps already in the US market. Meet5’s users attend an average of four events each month, Reinhardt said.
Originally founded in 2017 as Go Crush, a dating app, Reinhardt and cofounder Kai Burghardt pivoted to group experiences focused on users over 40 at the end of 2019.
Reinhardt said the company became profitable “by mid-2024 for about a year” before its Series A. Now, Meet5 is spending its cash to grow the app and company. Meet5 has 65 employees, and plans to expand hiring in the US.
The startup’s primary revenue model is its premium subscription, which costs about $12.50 a month and unlocks features like private messaging, invite-only meetups, and the ability to filter events by category.
“It’s normally way harder to monetize friendship apps,” Reinhardt said, adding that people would “rather pay for love than friends.”
But Reinhardt feels good about his friendship app’s freemium model. About 12% of Meet5’s monthly users are paid, Reinhardt said.
Read the pitch deck Meet5 used to raise its Series A:
Note: Some details have been updated, such as Meet5’s number of registered users, participants, and funding. The deck below includes two additional slides (pages 9 and 10) that were added after Meet5 expanded to the US.
Meet5 is an IRL social app
Meet5
Its deck starts by outlining stats about the startup
Meet5
Then Meet5 lays out a problem it says people are facing
Meet5
Meet5 pitches itself as a way to ‘discover new friendships’
Meet5
The deck then explains how Meet5 works
Meet5
Meet5 uses a freemium model to make money
Meet5
Then the deck goes deeper into the app’s traction
Meet5
Meet5 outlines its plans to expand to the US
Meet5
Then it goes into its early traction in the US
Meet5
‘Let’s combat loneliness!’ is how the deck ends
Meet5
