Make Plans Like Magic: Why We Invested In Pie

The staff of Pie, with Founder Andy Dunn seated, in maroon blazer.

Today the United States is facing a new health concern that affects more people than diabetes or obesity: social isolation. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, increasing use of social media and mobile devices, and declining religiosity, we’ve lost 24 hours a month of in-person social interaction since 2003. For those 15-24 years old, in-person time with friends is down a startling 70%. 

The alarm from experts prompted the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, to call the issue an  “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” in a 2023 official report.  The issue is also global: the World Health Organization made loneliness a “global public health concern.”

Yet there have been few successful efforts to address this crisis, leading the New York Times Magazine to ask, “Why is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?”

Pie, a company led by Bonobos co-founder and CEO, Andy Dunn, is focused on solving social isolation by making it very easy to join social plans in person, nearby, with just two taps in the Pie app. Events include “show and tell for grownups” and “stitch and bitch” and “snail mail sundays” (where groups get together to write letters –gasp– with pen and paper), among others created by users themselves. 

Pie enables users to see which of their friends are attending an event, and gives users tools to plan an outing with old and new friends without requiring a flood of group messages. We have all suffered through those ordeals. 

Pie can even pair you up with an AI-curated dinner group, thoughtfully arranged to spark new relationships. Today, Pie is live in Chicago with tens of thousands of users, with plans to expand across the country. 

Companies are keenly aware of this problem, too. The casual social collisions that used to happen in the workplace are less probable now, because employees are working both fewer and non-overlapping days in the office. This has led to inevitable consequences; Gen Z employees are significantly less likely to have made friends at work. Without a social dimension to the workplace, employees are more likely to quit and are less likely to be happy, eroding productivity. Pie catalyzes social collisions on behalf of companies, creating opportunities for employees to engage and form important social bonds as they have in the past. 

We have been following Andy and Pie’s evolution for several years, and he is the right person to lead this business. Andy is an expert in creating consumer brands, and has surmounted his own mental health challenges–  both which are chronicled in his captivating book, Burn Rate. 

Origin Ventures is pleased to be backing Pie in its latest round of funding, led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures. Kirsten backed Andy 17 years ago when he started Bonobos. Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and founder of Blogger, Medium, and Obvious Ventures, also joined the round as a returning investor. News of the round was covered in the Wall Street Journal. 

We look forward to working with Andy and the entire Pie team as they solve this important problem.