Howbout, a London-based app startup that makes it easier for groups of friends to make plans, has picked up a total of £1.92 million from investors, including ACF Investors, Supernode Global, Boost Capital, and angel investors Claire Valoti and Desigan Chinniah.
The money will be used to assist the Howbout app’s international growth, hire additional employees, and make research and development investments. This total round close announcement follows the £1 million seed round that the company raised earlier this year and was co-led by Boost Capital and Supernode Global.
Co-founder and CEO Neil Tanna said, “Being spontaneous is incredibly difficult. Howbout makes it incredibly simple to move from planning to plan-made. It’s been a terrific start: “Since we debuted, there has been extremely exciting growth, and the reaction has been excellent. This funding will greatly aid our efforts to grow into new areas and advance our technology.
“Howbout’s organic global growth is a tribute to how much value people are getting out of this software,” stated Tim Mills, Managing Partner at ACF Investors. We forget that this is a space that is truly ripe for innovation since the existing social media giants are in the news so frequently—rarely for good reasons. Users are moving away from open forums and toward more personal, carefully selected venues that are populated by people they value. It’s an exciting time, and Howbout has a great possibility of becoming a significant success story because Gen Z is so enthused about this new social wave.
Social media behemoths are currently under a lot of pressure as consumers get sick of privacy invasions and toxic behavior, advertisers lose faith, and share values plummet by billions. Dark social media sites like BeReal, Discord, and Howbout offer an alternative that puts a focus on anonymity, small-scale communities, and strong relationships in response to this.
Neil Tanna, a former corporate lawyer, pals Jake Jenner, a former investment banker, and Duncan Cowan, a software and electrical systems engineer, created Howbout after graduating from college.
Unlike other platforms that emphasize followers, admirers, and feeds, it is a private social network that focuses on friendships. It aims to consolidate a user’s social life in one location. The software enables users to create groups and shared calendars with their various social circles, easily establish and schedule plans utilizing instant availability scheduling tools or polls, talk directly about every plan, and more.
Since its inception in August 2020, Howbout has received over 500,000 downloads and more than 3 million plans have been created by users in more than 125 countries. On the app, 100,000 plans are currently created each week.
Image Credit: Howbout
