SLAY, a brand-new social network based in Berlin has raised €2.5M in a pre-Seed round of funding headed by Accel. SLAY intends to encourage beneficial online interactions for teenagers through entertaining social gaming experiences.
Additionally investing in the round were Harry Stebbing’s 20VC and other investors like Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Scott Belsky, Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures), and Alex Pall, a musician (The Chainsmokers).
SLAY has now been ported to a variety of languages and is now available on both iOS and Android smartphones. It is also becoming more and more well-liked in other countries, including the UK, where it was recently released.
“We’re particularly pleased by the SLAY app, both in terms of its initial appeal among teens and the team’s positive purpose of enhancing teenage mental health in the digital environment,” says Julien Bek, Principal at Accel. Nearly half of the SLAY team’s current users already use it each school day.
SLAY claims it will utilize the money to strengthen its product and consumer teams, officially launch the platform in new nations, and enhance the app’s features and functioning.
Social media has witnessed a rapid proliferation of negativity and criticism in recent years. Popular platforms like Instagram and Facebook have come in for more media and public criticism because of their negative impacts on users’ mental health as well as their shortcomings in terms of content moderation and safety issues.
This is particularly true for young teenagers because numerous research has looked at how social media and the internet affect their mental health and have found potentially negative links to problems of mood and mental health.
SLAY hopes to change this in this area. The social network app, which now has over 250,000 members, intends to combat the teen mental health epidemic by normalizing these online encounters.
SLAY is a “positive-only” app that users can use to respond to positive surveys about others. It was founded in 2022. Through anonymity, it enables users to congratulate their friends and “be honest.”
“The status of social media today is worse than ever before,” claims Fabian Kamberi. Young people’s mental health is being negatively impacted by a combination of superficial interactions, controversial discussions, and influencer-driven expectations as billions of people use platforms like Instagram and TikTok to communicate with friends and express their online identities.
We created SLAY to promote pleasant, safe, meaningful social connections through the power of praises and positive game modes in the app, continues Kamberi, because “it has always been my objective to design wonderful apps for teenagers.”
The SLAY app prompts users to choose a different user (from their school, class, or peer group) to anonymously commend as they answer 12 questions when they first launch it.
The software might, for instance, ask a user, “Who inspires me to give it my all?” They can then select one of four additional schoolmates to cover the cost of this “slay.” All users will be able to view the compliments they have received if they properly answer the 12 questions when logging on, but the name of the person who delivered the compliment will remain hidden.
Image Credit: SLAY
