附近上门

F3, a new social app aimed at Generation Z, has raised a $3.9 million seed round led by the Mamba dating network, the company announced Tuesday.

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The app lets users send each other questions, photos and videos, and reply to each other鈥檚 posts. Users don鈥檛 just post what they think is interesting, but rather reply to content others have sent them, co-founder Girts Tihomirovs said in an interview with 附近上门 News.聽

While can be like a mood board or a place to post the best photos from a vacation, and Snapchat is more raw and in real-time–something Gen Z gravitates toward–F3 takes it a step further, Tihomirovs said.

According to the company, the app encourages more honest conversation by allowing users to reply to posts anonymously. The company has taken safety protocols including automatic content moderation and explicit photo and video detection, per F3.

The founding team of F3 was also behind social networking site , which grew to more than 150 million users before it was sold to , owner of brands like and

The idea for F3 was inspired by Ask.Fm, according to Tihomirovs. The team wanted to build a social network from the ground up, but aimed at the current young audience (Generation Z), instead of millennials.

鈥淒uring Ask.Fm we accumulated a lot of knowledge around this topic and when we sold Ask.Fm we went on a little hiatus and thought about what we鈥檇 like to do and so we actually played around with a lot of ideas. 鈥� but then, step by step, we basically realized that we have quite (a number) of things that we saw at the moment that could be realized in a form of F3 and of course it was linked in many ways with our previous experience,鈥� co-founder and lead product designer said.

Based in Riga, Latvia, F3 was officially launched in 2018, with the first stage of development funded by the founders. The $3.9 million seed is the first round of money the company has raised. Investors in the company include the dating app, with its investor , the venture capital firm , former president , and general partner .

F3 has more than 25 million registered users on the app, with about 85 percent of them under the age of 25.聽

The company plans on using the new funding to create more interesting tools, new ways to create content, and new ways to discover interesting people and content, Tihomirovs said. It will be growing its team, which is currently about 30 full-time employees, by hiring mostly product team members, and also plans on eventually opening an office in the United States–something that so far hasn鈥檛 really been possible because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company is also planning on expanding in the United States and North America. The company鈥檚 target audience is in Europe, with about half of its users there, with 20 percent in South America, and 20 percent elsewhere.聽

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias