Tech caused the loneliness epidemic. Can it also be a cure?

FastCompany: America is in the thick of a loneliness epidemic. More than a fifth of the population reports feeling isolated. In a 2024 Harvard survey , 73% of people say that technology is part of the problem. Could technology also be the cure? Andy Dunn hopes so. Dunn, best known as the founder of the menswear label Bonobos, which sold to Walmart for $310 million in 2017, has turned his attention to a trickier problem: friendship. Over the past five years, he’s been building an app that helps people to make real-life friends.

In 2024, that idea crystallized into Pie, which helps users find local events and uses an algorithm to identify people they are most likely to click with. Dunn landed $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures, an early Bonobos investor. Dunn has been testing the app in Chicago and Austin, but now he believes it’s ready to go nationwide. The app is slowly rolling out in cities across the country, and he’s just hired Nadya Okamoto, founder of the period care brand August, as his co-founder and CMO. The app currently has 300,000 active users. “We’ve been building Pie with a lot of momentum for two years,” Dunn says.

“Now, we need to start a movement and bring in an army of people who believe that getting people together is important.” A DTC Pioneer Launching an app is new territory for Dunn. He was a pioneer of the direct-to-consumer movement, launching Bonobos with his Stanford Business School roommate Brian Spaly in 2007. The company, known for its flattering men’s trousers, raised $127 million in funding, fueling rapid growth through its website and stores. After the Walmart acquisition, Dunn came on to help run the company’s growing stable of digital brands.

Building a disruptive clothing business was thrilling to Dunn in the 2010s, but he believes there are bigger problems to tackle today. While many DTC brands were focused on improving consumers’ quality of life with consumer products, he believes that today’s consumers are preoccupied with social issues like the growing wealth gap, the looming threat of AI to their careers, and loneliness. Many other players in the DTC movement have also moved away from consumer brands to wrestle with other issues: The founders of Everlane and Allbirds have each launched supplements companies.

Forerunner Ventures , which backed Glossier, Away, and Dollar Shave Club, is now investing in healthcare, mental health and wealth-building startups. [Screenshot: courtesy Pie] Tech for Friendship Dunn recently learned firsthand how hard it is to make friends as an adult. He moved from New York to Chicago in 2021 to be closer to his parents, and in the months that followed, he realized that he had no one to call up for dinner. Part of it comes down to the mechanics of making friends. When he read Dr. Marisa Franco’s book Platonic , he discovered the insight that friendships only happen when people run into one another repeatedly.

Over the course of between five to ten interactions, people tend to open up to one another. That’s a hard thing to engineer in a modern world with fewer institutions bringing people together, but Dunn believes that technology can help with this. “I got really excited about how to create a product that would foster social collision,” he says. “How do you create a product that lets you to run into someone in a group setting?” Pie is far from the first app to tackle the problem of making friends. One recent example is Bumble BFF, the dating app’s effort at friend-making, which launched in 2023 and has since been folded into a new app.

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The article discusses a significant shift in brand strategy towards addressing social issues, which is impactful for the industry, while the concept of using technology to combat loneliness is relatively new and relevant to brand strategy professionals seeking to engage consumers meaningfully.