Female friendship app gofrendly raises €1.17m for UK expansion

Gofrendly, a Swedish friendship app for women, was recently granted an extra €1.17 million ($1.25 million) in funding by JNE Invest to expand to the United Kingdom.

Founded in 2015 by Ulrika Lilja and Claudia Gård, gofrendly helps women develop high-quality platonic relationships — built on empowerment and connectedness.

Lija and Gård first met on a platonic date. Through their encounters, they realised how building meaningful friendships between women could empower them to succeed in their careers and widen their horizons. Their conversations eventually gave birth to gofrendly, an app built to connect women who share the same passions and struggles.

Helping women build meaningful friendships

According to a study conducted by the global information analytics company Elsevier, women who participate in female-based friendships generate calming hormones that help mitigate the effects of stress.

A UCLA report revealed similar results — women are more prone to befriend one another in hardship and distress, whereas men are more likely to demonstrate a fight-or-flight response.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to establish such connections. A YouGov poll found that 52 percent of women in the UK are having trouble making friends.

In fact, a survey commissioned by the Wall Street Journal found that a third of 16-24-year-old women in the United States have been using dating apps to make platonic female friends rather than to build romantic relationships. However, dating apps can be a hassle to use for this specific purpose.

Gofrendly was created to fill that niche. Using AI technology to bring women together according to their shared interests and experiences, gofrendly allows users to focus on the pleasure of meeting new friends rather than the trouble of finding them.

Since its launch, nearly 250.000 female users from various Scandinavian countries have signed up, including 65 percent of all 20-35-year-old women in Stockholm, who use the app to schedule meet-ups and form meaningful connections.

By securing this new funding, the startup hopes to enter new frontiers to target a market of millions of women.