No login. No email chain. Just a text and a vibe.
Open Partiful and there is no account to make, no app to download, no "are you going / maybe / can't make it" buried in someone's inbox. A host picks a wild gradient, types a time, and fires off a link. Guests tap, RSVP, and start posting reactions before they've left the group chat. That deliberate lack of friction is the entire bet Shreya Murthy made, and it is why a tool for throwing apartment parties now runs in more than 100 countries and shows up on Gen Z phones the way Facebook Events once did on everyone else's.
Murthy is the cofounder and CEO. She did not arrive here from a lifelong love of event software. She arrived from Palantir, where she ran business operations and strategy, and before that from ASAPP, where she was Head of Product Deployment. Somewhere in the middle of those serious jobs she started asking a deceptively small question: what would she actually pour her heart and soul into? The answer, it turned out, was your birthday party.
Parties are not this frivolous waste of time. They're how we build community.- Shreya Murthy
The cofounder story has a nice symmetry to it. A mutual Palantir colleague heard Murthy was hunting for a technical partner and pointed her toward Joy Tao. Tao had spent time at Meta doing exactly the kind of work the two of them would later set out to undo: figuring out how to keep people on Facebook as long as possible. They bonded over the same itch - that social media, the thing supposedly built to connect us, had quietly become very good at keeping us apart. So they built tech with the opposite goal. Get you off the phone. Get you into a room with people you like.
The worst possible launch year
They started Partiful in 2020. Lockdowns. Empty bars. The single worst calendar year in living memory to start a company premised on gathering strangers in living rooms. And yet the timing kept making their case for them. The longer people stayed apart, the more obvious it became how much the in-person stuff mattered. "In the past, we almost took socializing for granted," Murthy has said. "And that's really changed." The pandemic didn't kill the party. It reminded everyone why they wanted one.
"Very few people took us seriously"
Two young women pitching a "party-planning startup" was, to a lot of investors, a reason to pass rather than lean in. "Very few people took us seriously," Murthy recalls of those early rooms. The skepticism was its own tell. The people closest to the product - the ones throwing the parties - already got it. In 2022 the doubt ran into the numbers. Partiful closed a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Initialized Capital in the round, reportedly at around a $100 million valuation. The "frivolous" startup had become a category.
Very few people took us seriously.- On the early fundraising rooms
The product earned the kind of nicknames money can't buy. The New York Times called it the "least cringe" way to invite people to things. Fans, less diplomatically, dubbed it "Facebook Events for hot people." Under the jokes is a real design choice: hosts can't see guests' direct contact information, so the platform stays a place to gather rather than a list to harvest. Privacy as a feature, not a footnote.
The Chalamet effect
If you want proof that Partiful had crossed into culture, consider the autumn of 2024, when a Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest organized on the platform spilled out of New York and went genuinely viral. Rather than treat it as a fluke, the team leaned all the way in, salting Chalamet references throughout the product, down to the newsletter sign-up forms. It was a very on-brand move for a company that treats the party itself - the gradients, the in-jokes, the reaction emojis - as the product, not just the logistics underneath it.
The momentum is not slowing. Partiful reports adding around two million users in just the first half of 2025. Google named it a Best App of 2024, and Apple shortlisted it as a finalist for the App Store Awards in Cultural Impact the same year. In 2025, Murthy landed on the TIME100 Next list, and Partiful joined TIME's roster of the 100 Most Influential Companies. She took the SXSW stage that spring for a session bluntly titled "Winning the Shift to IRL."
Loneliness was the actual problem statement
Strip away the gradients and the emoji and the founding question gets serious fast. What pulled Murthy and Tao together was not a love of logistics but a worry about loneliness, social isolation, and the way social media had drifted into dividing people rather than connecting them. That is a strange origin for a product whose surface job is sending out invites. But it explains the choices underneath. Every decision in Partiful seems to answer the same question: does this make it easier to actually be in a room together, or does it just create another thing to manage on a screen? When the answer is the second one, it tends not to ship.
Tao has put words to the part most invite tools miss. "There are a lot of social dynamics in planning a party," she has said. "It's about conveying thoughts and wishes of the host and the vibe of the party." That sentence is the difference between a form and a feeling. A spreadsheet can collect a headcount. It cannot tell your friends what kind of night this is going to be. Partiful's whole personality - the loud color washes, the playful copy, the reactions piling up under an event - exists to carry that signal, the thing a good host communicates without quite saying it.
What the early rooms misjudged
It is worth sitting with how badly the skeptics misread the opportunity. The knock was that party planning is small, soft, unserious - a feature, not a company. The reality is that an enormous amount of real-world spending flows through social plans and events, and almost none of the software around them had been built for the people who throw them most. By treating the party as the product rather than an afterthought, Murthy and Tao walked into a category hiding in plain sight. The investors who passed weren't wrong about the size of a birthday invite. They were wrong about what a birthday invite is attached to.
What comes after the apartment party
The ambition Murthy describes is bigger than birthdays. She talks about building the social layer for offline life - extending from casual hangouts to formal events, group trips, camping weekends, supper clubs, concerts and community gatherings. Ticketing has emerged as the first real monetization path, aimed at exactly those organized, ticketed events. On the money question she is unbothered and unhurried: "While we're not yet ready to share our monetization plans, we believe there's a ton of spend on real-world social plans and events, and we're well positioned to capture it." On the exit question, even cooler: "We're still relatively early in our journey, so we're less focused on specific exit paths at this time."
A first-generation American and Princeton politics graduate, Murthy has ended up building something her old employers were, in different ways, optimizing against - a piece of technology whose success is measured by how quickly you put your phone down and turn to the person next to you. The pitch decks called it a party app. She keeps insisting it's infrastructure. Several million RSVPs later, the distinction is getting harder to argue with.