Company: Houseparty
Founder: Ben Rubin, Itai Danino and Sima Sistani
Website: houseparty.com
The Business: A social networking app allowing multiple users to video chat together.
About Houseparty
Founded in 2011, Houseparty is an app that facilitates group video chats, users able to host a “room” (a video call) with up to eight people. On the platform, users can hold an infinite amount of these rooms, and can hop easily from one to another.
When a user opens Houseparty, their friends will be notified and can join various chats with their contacts – this is unless you use their “Sneak into the House” feature, which stops the app from alerting the user’s contacts when they go online.
In addition to video chats, the platform also offers a range of different games for users to play with their friends, including Houseparty Heads Up!, Trivia, Quick Draw, and Chips and Guac. The startup claim:
“Houseparty’s group video chat brings empathy to online communication. We want people to get out from behind curated feeds and get back to having real conversations, face to face, with people they care about.”
The startup has raised a total of $70.2 million over the course of 5 funding rounds, the most recent of these being a Series C in December 2016.
The app has been a popular hit especially during COVID-19, helping people to stay connected to friends and family through the group video calls. In April, Houseparty reported 50 million sign-ups to its platform in only a month, becoming the number 1 social app for 82 different countries, and the number 1 overall app in 16 different countries.
