2 Yale students raised $5 million for their social network that lives in iMessage. Read their pitch deck.

• Series, a networking app focused on Gen Z, lives fully in iMessage.
• Founded by Yale students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, the startup raised $5.1 million.
• Read the pitch deck Series is sharing with investors as it raises its new funding round.

Once a day, I get a text message with 10 photos of random people looking for jobs, professional connections, or, on occasion, a new friend or date.

It’s not LinkedIn or Tinder texting me. It’s Series, a social networking startup that sends potential connections straight to its users’ iMessage inbox.

“The whole goal of Series was to build a professional network where Gen Z lives, which is in their messages,” Series CEO Nathaneo Johnson told Business Insider.

Building a social network layer on top of iMessage allows users to feel the “intimacy of having someone’s phone number,” but with a bit more privacy, he added.

If you want, you can share your direct contact info with someone you meet through Series. But the default is for you to reply to other users via Series’ messaging service. That service lives within a single iMessage conversation, with distinct threads for replying to different people (and to the platform’s AI chatbot).

The startup, cofounded by Yale students Johnson and Sean Hargrow, both 22, raised $3.1 million last March and recently announced it has closed another $2 million in funding. That brings the company’s total pre-seed financing to $5.1 million.

Its investors include Venmo cofounder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and venture capital firms such as Uncommon Projects, Pear VC, and Parable Ventures.

The startup is also looking to raise additional capital, Johnson said. Series is targeting an 8-figure seed round.

The team is looking to further scale its platform and hire engineering talent with its targeted seed funding, Johnson added. Its pre-seed funding was used to hire its initial team — eight people — and bring the product to market.

Series deployed marketing stunts in the past year to grow its platform, including “hiring” a robot to accompany the founders as they pitched the platform to college students, filming a reality-TV-style series, and hopping on the trend of viral launch videos to stir buzz.

The top goal for Series, now, is “making sure we continue to grow the network as dense and as fast as we can,” Johnson said.

A new way to network for the AI era

While people can use Series to find love or camaraderie, its main use case is young professionals seeking networking opportunities.

Johnson said the startup first branded itself as an “AI social network, which essentially is still true.”

“But we realized we need to relatively niche down in the type of connections we were making,” he continued, which meant doubling down on professional connections in its marketing and product development.

Series is one of several AI startups, including Gigi and Boardy, taking on LinkedIn by pitching that they can help people network better and faster.

If Series recommends someone who stands out, users can hold down on the photo and react like they would any iMessage content: using an emoji or directly replying. Users can also prompt the Series bot with what type of people they’re looking for, such as startup founders or investors. The platform uses a third-party service that lets Series send and receive iMessages. Android users can sign up for Series, but Johnson said the experience is more limited via SMS text messages.

Series users no longer need a college email address to sign up.

As for monetizing, the service is free for now, and Series is considering enterprise options, such as offering its network as a hiring resource to companies or agencies.

Read the pitch deck Series is sharing with investors as it raises its seed round:

Note: Some slides and figures have been redacted.

Series dubs itself the ‘professional network for Gen Z’

It starts the deck explaining how AI is a technological shift

It then outlines a problem: People don’t always respond to DMs

It introduces Series as a network that is ‘entirely on iMessage’

Then, it explains how the app works — using iMessage styling

Series then introduces its 8-person team

It also includes retention data points

Then, it includes a slide about its marketing strategy, which includes LinkedIn

Series tells investors it is ‘pre-revenue by choice’

It ends the deck by sharing contact information and info about its pre-seed round

Read the original article on Business Insider

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