When Palantir alums Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao set out to build an app that brings people together they knew some chaos was needed to lure in Gen Z, but they didn’t know Timothée Chalamet would also be thrown into the mix.
During the fall of 2024, fans flocked to New York’s Washington Square Park dressed as Timothée Chalamet, not knowing that, one he would show up, or two, this would set out a massive nationwide trend.
Following YouTuber Anthony Po’s Timothée Chalamet look alike contest in October 2024, which was organized using the Partiful app, the lookalike phenomenon spread like wildfire across the nation, relying on the now hyperpopular app to spread the word.
“This sort of groundswell combining meme culture, content, celebrity, and press is the stuff of startup dreams,” contributor John Jannuzzi wrote for Inc.‘s winter issue.
The chaotic success of lookalike contests mimics the apps own fun party-like design which has brought in devoted Gen Z users. Just five years after its founding, the app has a five-star rating with 99,800 Apple Store reviews, and millions of users turned to the app in just the first half of 2025.
But the app wasn’t started to just chase viral moments, but rather as an exit from the founder’s frustrating stints at tech companies like Palantir and Meta.
“I think we were both growing disillusioned with the places we had worked and the missions those companies were serving,” Murthy told Inc.
After meeting through a mutual friend, with $20 million from series A funding, the pair built a company that not only be proud of, but fufill a need for connection.
“Social media—which had this grand promise of bringing us closer together—was actually dividing us more than ever,” Tao shared to Inc.
“They built something that makes it actually easy to bring people together,” spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that backed partiful in 2022, told Inc. “What got us excited from day one was their conviction that human connection isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s essential.”
Read the full story, “How Partiful Became the Life of Gen-Z’s IRL Party.”
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María José Gutierrez Chavez
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