He built an app so that at 2am, in the worst hour of a divorce or a diagnosis or a loss, you can join a room of strangers who already know exactly what you mean.
The anthropologist who decided loneliness was a product problem.
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Sign up for Circles and it asks you for almost nothing. A first name. That is the price of entry. No profile to polish, no last name to hide behind, no camera you have to fix your face for. Many of the groups are audio only, on purpose. You join a small circle of people carrying the same specific weight you are - a divorce, the loss of a parent, infertility, caregiving, a narcissistic relationship, the strange quiet of leaving the military - and a trained facilitator holds the room while you talk.
Irad Eichler is the founder and CEO who designed it that way. Circles matches people into cohorts by the precise shape of what they are going through, then meets them weekly, live, guided by vetted mental health professionals. It is group therapy unbundled from the waiting room and the price tag, rebuilt to fit inside a phone and to be awake when you are.
The pitch is almost suspiciously simple: the most useful person in your worst moment is often not a doctor. It is someone two steps further down the same road. Eichler has spent a career turning that single observation into institutions. Before Circles there was Shekulo Tov. Before Shekulo Tov there was a hospital room and a lesson from his mother he has never stopped building around.
Today Circles counts more than 160,000 members and runs over 500 sessions a week. Eichler says roughly 90% of people who use it report feeling happier. He is careful to call it a complement to therapy, not a replacement - a way to answer the U.S. Surgeon General's warning that loneliness now touches about half of American adults, one small room at a time.
In the middle of the night when you are overwhelmed with grief, where do you turn?— Irad Eichler, on the question Circles was built to answer
Eight years before Circles, Irad's mother was dying of cancer. He was there for all of it - present, attentive, the good son. And still, near the end, she told him she felt lonely. Not for lack of love. For lack of someone who could actually relate. He could hold her hand. He could not say me too.
Then he watched her with a friend who had also battled cancer, and saw her come alive in a way she didn't with him. The friend wasn't a better person or a better listener. The friend had simply walked the same road. That was the medicine.
When his mother died, Eichler noticed the same thing inside his own grief: the support that landed hardest came from his siblings and from others who had lost a parent. He went looking for a place where anyone facing an emotional challenge could find that specific kind of company. There wasn't one. So he set out to build it. The whole architecture of Circles - matching by shared experience, the audio-only intimacy, the one-name anonymity - is an attempt to manufacture, at scale, what a dying woman found by accident in an old friend.
It would be easy to read Circles as a first-timer's idealism. It is the opposite. In 2005, fifteen years before Circles, Eichler founded The Shekulo Tov Group to help people with psychiatric disabilities reach ordinary, hard-won goals: a job, a home of their own, a life pointed in a direction they chose. He did not run it as a charity that hands out comfort. He ran it as an enterprise that produces outcomes.
By the time he was done scaling it, Shekulo Tov employed around 450 people, turned over roughly $40 million a year, and served some 7,000 people annually - the largest organization of its kind in Israel. Its integrative model won the "Project Zero" prize for impactful social enterprises. The United Nations recognized his work on mental health and developmental disabilities. The World Economic Forum named him Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Bar Ilan, where he'd studied anthropology, gave him its Social Leadership Award.
That track record is the quiet engine under Circles. Eichler is not a founder learning how to run something; he is an operator who already knows that good intentions die without good systems, and who chose, in his fifties, to point those systems at a problem most people treat as unsolvable: the plain human ache of going through something alone.
For Circles he brought in Dan Landa, a former senior marketing executive at Google, as co-founder, and surrounded the product with serious clinical weight - figures like the group-therapy expert Dr. Haim Weinberg and the psychologist and TED speaker Dr. Guy Winch shaping how the rooms actually work. The result is a company that feels less like a wellness app and more like an attempt to industrialize a feeling.
Eichler's case rests on a distinction therapy culture often blurs. A clinician can be brilliant and still, in your hardest moment, be a stranger to it. The thing that loosens the knot is recognition - the person across from you who hears your worst sentence and answers, without flinching, "I know." Circles is engineered to deliver that recognition on demand, the way the rest of the internet delivers everything else: instantly, at 2am, without an appointment.
He's careful about the boundary. Circles is meant to complement professional care, not stand in for it. The facilitators are trained and vetted. The point is reach. When the U.S. Surgeon General warns that loneliness now shadows roughly half of American adults, the bottleneck isn't insight - it's access and affordability. There aren't enough therapists, the hours don't match the crisis, and the cost locks most people out. Peer support, structured well, scales where one-on-one care cannot.
So Eichler optimized for the opposite of prestige. One first name to join. Audio over video, because a voice is less to perform than a face. Tight cohorts sorted by the exact contour of the problem, so a person navigating a narcissistic relationship isn't dropped into a generic "anxiety" bucket. His advice to other founders mirrors the product: be laser focused, prove one core thing works, resist the urge to be everything. He built a company that does one thing - puts the right strangers in the right room - and tries to do it better than anyone.
The money followed the focus. An $8 million seed in 2021, led by NFX and Flint Capital with the impact investor Sir Ronald Cohen and Jeff Swartz alongside. Then a $16.5 million Series A in 2022, led by Zeev Ventures, with Lior Ron of Uber Freight joining - capital earmarked to sharpen the matching algorithm, the part of Circles that decides who belongs in your room. Around $24.5 million in total, betting that empathy is an infrastructure problem worth solving.
"Sharing and listening to others with the same pain, issue, or challenge, is extremely therapeutic."
"With Circles, people never have to face their struggles alone."
"Being present is about noticing what you feel - and what the other person might be feeling as well."
"Around 90% of people who have used Circles say they are happier."
He lives on a kibbutz - a collective, by definition. A man whose home is built on shared life now builds shared life for everyone else.
His first degree is in anthropology, from Bar Ilan. An odd launchpad for health tech - or the perfect one for someone obsessed with how humans actually connect.
He keeps an MBA and a Harvard executive certificate in public leadership in the same toolkit as a kibbutz address.
He reaches for Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for individuality - and gifts Byron Katie's journal for letting go. Two opposite books, one founder.
A father of four whose children spent more than a year backpacking the world over the past decade.
Fastest-growing topics on his platform: narcissistic relationships, caregiving, and military transition. A map of where modern loneliness actually lives.
No one in the world will be left alone while dealing with a life challenge.— The Circles vision Eichler is building toward