weekly startup spotlight
boardy 📞
welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj — always up to something in social good x tech.
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onto today’s topic: boardy 📞
america is in a loneliness epidemic. as ai friends have begun to pop up, the question i ask is, can we engineer human connectivity?
i firmly believe the place for ai is to facilitate human connection, not replace it.
boardy, a consumer-facing startup founded in 2024, embodies a similar philosophy — leveraging ai voice technology to facilitate warm introductions within a network of other users. 🕸️ essentially, a user can send a message over to boardy, an ai agent, on linkedin with their phone number and email, and then boardy will call the user and have a conversation. based on the conversation, boardy can make relevant connections to other callers once both users have agreed to be connected.
it’s a super connector that’s more authentic than making judgements based off social media profiles. boardy gets to know a user, thus ensuring the connections are built with trust.
let’s talk numbers! 🤓
the conversational ai market is projected to grow from $13.2 billion in 2024 to $49.9 billion by 2030 at a cagr of 24.9%.
as andrew d’souza, co-founder & ceo, put it, “we built boardy to create a better future, where ai actually makes us more connected to each other and where humans and ai collaborate to solve humanity’s hardest problems.”
certainly, as of april 2025, boardy has facilitated 40,000+ introductions with 10,000+ conversations. the team is focused on expansion now after raising an $8 million seed round led by creandum, hence why boardy is completely free to use. the real value-add proves itself once boardy’s network has expanded to 100,000+ people.
questions i’d be interested to ask:
what is the strategy around mitigating bias in boardy’s conversations and facilitated connections?
does boardy take any context from a user’s linkedin profile, or is it solely based on conversation?
currently, boardy operates solely for professional networking purposes — is there any plan in the long-term to extend this to personal connections? where is the line drawn?
daily opportunity + resource drops 🔍️
apply to the $10,000 boardy fellowship alongside a paid trip to toronto tech week
operations internship @ a16z
registration for the grace hopper celebration conference is open
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teehee,
harsehaj ✌️
PS. if you have a question/topic you think would be interesting for me to reflect on, don’t hesitate to comment or reply to my emails with any ideas you ever have. :)