(2019-11-26) Cocoons Social App For Close Friends Gets Vc Backing To Chase Paths Dream

Cocoon’s social app for close friends gets VC backing to chase Path.com’s dream. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren’t homes for your real friends anymore because they’re too big, too commercial and too influencer-y

While Life360 is the app for concerned parents, Cocoon wants to be the app for curious long-distance families who want to check on their family and closest friends more easily.

It’s the app’s focus on close friends that has drawn comparisons to Dave Morin’s oft-loved social networking app Path.

"at the core, our solution is actually quite different.""

That core difference, the founders tell me, is that Cocoon isn’t a social network. People are signing up to be in this small group with a few close friends of family members but the groups are closed and users aren’t (currently) logging into multiple groups.

There are some clean parallels to other consumer apps, but the biggest competitor to Cocoon is what goes down in the small groups you have in iMessage or any of your other chat apps. Cocoon wants to be a properly-interfaced social network inside a group chat where everything is for the group’s benefit only.

Like Path, the startup has a noble goal but a social app with dramatically lessened network effects certainly seems like it might have some sustainability issues. The app is currently free, but the founders say that they won’t be selling any user data or surfacing ads, hoping to add in a subscription pricing model to sustain the business.

The company has a bit of cash to sustain things on their own for a while. Cocoon wrapped a $3 million seed round in May