Two college students raise $5.1 million pre-seed to build AI social network on iMessage

Social networking app Series announced it has raised $5.1 million in a pre-seed round with investors including Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale University students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow. Both are still fourth year university students.

CEO Johnson told TechCrunch that the company sees itself as a next-generation social networking platform rather than an AI app, praising it as one of the first companies to function entirely through iMessage.

Users text their phone number (Series AI) with iMessage and explain who they are and who they want to connect with. From there, Series AI messages back to the user, offering so-called “shares,” an easy-to-swipe carousel of 10 images, of posts from other users on the same Series AI who are seeking connections for similar reasons. Each carousel card contains a person’s photo and its question, and users can long-press on a photo in the carousel to start a private conversation with another user in Series AI chat without having to share their personal number.

Johnson, who studied computer science and economics, is the founder of a unique era in technology history, marked by rapid advances in AI and unprecedented amounts of investor money. He is one of the next generation of young founders whose business and thinking has been AI-first since the beginning, and investors argue that this gives young founders a head start over incumbent and older founders who are pivoting and trying to catch up.

He sees the industry undergoing a major technology shift from user interfaces to conversational interfaces, from Google Search to ChatGPT, for example. “They’re used to scrolling through libraries and clicking on websites, versus talking to things like AI to quickly identify what they’re looking for.”

Johnson and Hargrow met while working on a podcast during their freshman year at the Yale Entrepreneurship Institute. Johnson said he interviews founders and CEOs to gain insight into building successful businesses, and through those conversations he “realized the power of warm connection.”

“Then we branched out from the club during the summer of our freshman year and started a business, building a company around the same theme and using AI as a facilitator for warm connections,” Johnson said. He and Hargrow, who studied neuroscience at Yale University, have worked on the current series many times. After about a year from our first prototype, we landed on a concept we liked and started fundraising for it in March 2025, building a team of eight people in the process.

Johnson and his team decided to create a now-viral LinkedIn video about the series’ launch. “We came up with the idea for the trailer at 1 a.m. the day before, stayed up all night filming the video, and posted it at 3 p.m. that same day,” Johnson said. Two days later, they met their first investors.

The platform recently opened beyond the college demographic, but is still targeted at Gen Z and professionals. Johnson said most people use it for business reasons, but some use it for dating or finding friends. “Students are using Series at over 750 campuses,” he said. “Series active users remained at 82% through day 30, which is higher than early Facebook benchmarks.”

Other companies in this space include Boardy AI, which also uses AI to accelerate network adoption.

The series’ new capital will be used to hire more engineers and expand product capabilities. After graduation, the company will remain on the East Coast, already working out of an office in Chelsea, N.Y. (Johnson said he often commutes two hours from New Haven, Conn., where Yale is located, to New York).

“We built the series’ initial network among schools in the Ivy League, and more notably on the East Coast. We also believe strongly in Silicon Alley,” Johnson said of the decision to stay east, coinciding with the trend of young consumer founders choosing New York over Silicon Valley.

Remarkably, he and Harglow did not drop out of college. Johnson said good days are when everything goes smoothly, but bad days can be days when you have to write a ton of exams or essays while balancing running the team. He said he didn’t drop out of college because he felt he had time to both study and run a company. Looks like he was right.

“You can use the extra time you have outside of your primary duties to make a leap forward in what you’re supposed to be doing,” he says. “People are often very afraid to take advantage of their extra time.”