Fresh Ink: Welcoming Atmosfy, Where the Future of Dining & Entertainment Discovery is Video-First
The Ink: Atmosfy’s $13M Seed funding
Investors: Annie Kadavy and Meera Clark
The Scoop: Do you ever dream about molten lava cakes oozing salted caramel syrup? Us too. Enter Atmosfy — the consumer social app that is quite literally bringing our most decadent dreams to life.
Atmosfy is revolutionizing search, discovery, and entertainment of dining, nightlife, and travel with their video-first social app. With Atmosfy, users can browse through short, engaging videos from restaurants, bars, and hotels as close as around the block and as exotic as around the world. These videos quench their thirst for information surrounding those must try dishes, can’t miss cocktails, *vibes,* and so much more.
In the app, users can easily navigate their city’s dining options from delivery to outdoor dining through captivating short form videos and engage with the content — be it via likes, comments, saves, or deeper searches — in real-time. With the ability to filter by distance, cuisine, feature, price, keyword, and more, Atmosfy is quickly becoming a go-to hub for foodies and adventurers in search of their next dining destination. And as users ourselves, we can attest to how hard it is to press pause on our in-app Atmosfy adventures!
What They’re Tackling: Video has continued to explode as a means of search, discovery, and entertainment across the web — particularly for younger generations. Estimates project that over 80% of online content will be made up of video in the coming years, while the digital video ad market already represents $46Bn+ of spend, growing an astounding 41% YoY. Yet, existing review platforms are not video optimized today and instead rely on heavy text-based UX for recommendations and reviews. These legacy engines are beleaguered by stale, crusty content that establishes neither affinity nor trust with next generation consumers. Furthermore, with COVID meaningfully resetting the review landscape as brick and mortar businesses of all shapes and sizes closed or materially changed shape, there exists a unique opportunity to emerge as the trusted next generation leader in online recommendations, reviews, and discovery.
Who They’re Engaging: Perhaps unsurprisingly given its video-first orientation, Atmosfy has taken off with Gen Z, where legacy discovery and review platforms have failed to establish loyalty. While the majority of Atmosfy’s user base falls in the 18–35 age range, the strongest contingency is indeed 18–24 where in-app engagement outperforms. This demographic is one that craves a much more immersive experience than simply looking at photos. They yearn to understand the texture of the cookie being broken in half, the sort of humans contributing energy to the room, and the overall experience of the creator.
What Drives Atmosfy’s Virality: Like so many of the most successful consumer companies, Atmosfy’s secret sauce is its community of content creators. Atmosfy has been able to build an impressive content moat with the support of its hyper engaged base of creators who have uploaded reviews for 1 million locations across 10 thousand cities. To put this into perspective, on Atmosfy, a new video is added every 15 seconds in key markets during peak hours — faster than you can even order that burrito!
Each of Atmosfy’s creators generate hundreds — if not thousands — of videos that historically have never made it off of their camera rolls, because they’ve been incentivized to only post a few choice moments — oftentimes ephemeral — to existing mass market social platforms. Because Atmosfy is a purpose built for sharing experiences, creators on Atmosfy actually gain more brand exposure the more they contribute to the community, creating a flywheel effect that is only getting stronger with time. As a result, Atmosfy frequently sees creators posting 10X as many videos to Atmosfy as they do to either Instagram or TikTok, enabling the platform to emerge as the central home for all of their experiences to live and be shared with others.
The Investor Perspective: At Redpoint, we believe that the future of search and discovery will be video first and social in nature. And if you chat with any Gen Zs, they’ll likely agree. With Atmosfy’s robust and growing repository of user generated content and the sophisticated technical infrastructure underlying their search and curation engines, we’re excited about the platform’s potential to grow into the online gateway to the broader experience economy.
We’re thrilled to announce our Seed investment in Atmosfy, where we’re joining a group of epic Angels like Kygo and institutional friends like Streamlined. Read more about the news in TechCrunch here — and begin salivating on the best boba, dumplings, and barbecue you’ve ever seen on the App Store here!
