For a social network that’s, for lack of a better term, monogamous, social network for couples Pair has just raised funding from so many high-profile investors I’m having trouble picking who to include in this headline, and seriously running out of room.
Investors in the company’s recent $4.2 million seed round include Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Ventures, Dave Morin, Paul Buchheit, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Michael Birch, Sam Altman, CrunchFund, Tencent, Yuri Milner, Betaworks, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Harjeet Taggar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brandee Barker, Brian Pokorny, Elad Gil, and Susan Wu.
This sounds like it would be an amazing dinner party.
The YCombinator startup, which was built by robust a team of five co-founders, Oleg Kostour, Jamie Murai, Anton Krutiansky, Aswinkumar Rajendiran and Michael Petrov, plans on using the funding to expand its mobile development and design team, of course.
Co-founder Kostour tells me that, because a social network exclusively for couples is sort of a rare occurrence, many see the company’s closest competitor as Path. “We’re both mobile apps that are giving you an easier way to share things with a smaller group of people,” he says, “However … the two tools are focused on different relationships.”
He, in addition to Path founder Dave Morin apparently, views the two apps as complementary, “I think we’ll see people using both Path and Pair, rather than choosing between them. As an example, we actually use Path as a company to share things with each other internally, but that doesn’t change the fact that I use Pair with my girlfriend.”
Unlike run-of-the mill text messaging, Pair allows a given boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever to trade photos via the app, in addition to simultaneously draw, share photos and simultaneously Thumbkiss — A unique Pair feature which leverages the iPhone’s touch screen and vibrates every time a given couple’s thumbs kiss. Seriously it is the future of communication.
Pair has seen over 220K downloads in the past month since its launch, and Kostour says he wants to “further explore” dynamic ways for couples to engage a la Thumbkiss, “At the end of the day, Pair is for a couple. It’s for them to use share their memories, have fun and talk to each other. That changes how we design the product. One of the challenges is to examine the more subtle social interactions that exist between couples, so we can integrate those interactions into Pair.”