By the end of October, Trill will no longer be functional. I was like, ‘Okay, we need to bring you on the team as part of leadership,’ and also, bring in the incredible community and user base that they built.'”īlue Fever isn’t disclosing the terms of the acquisition, but with today’s announcement, Trill will begin incentivizing its users to move over to Blue Fever. “I’ll never forget when I met Georgia in person, and she was like, ‘Here’s how I see the future of emotional media,’ which is what we call ourselves instead of social media,” McAnany said. McAnany wasn’t necessarily looking for an acquisition, but she told TechCrunch that when she met the founders of Trill, she was so impressed with them that she wanted to find a way to collaborate. With McAnany as CEO and co-founder, Blue Fever has secured $4.2 million in venture backing from investors like Amazon Alexa Fund, Bumble Fund and Serena Williams. Meanwhile, Greta McAnany was looking for opportunities to reach more Gen Z users on Blue Fever, an anonymous social network encouraging authenticity and community support. Since a large community of young people use their app as a reprieve, Messinger and Sokolov wanted to make sure that if they were acquired, it would be by a company that shared their fundamental mission to develop supportive communities for young people online. “But as you can see, it’s now October 2021, so we weren’t rushing into anything.” “We wanted to be able to keep ourselves open to explore other interests, enjoy our time at school and take care of our own mental health - not doing this full-time job while juggling all of life’s other priorities,” Messinger explained. But the college student founders started to look into opportunities to be acquired during the summer of 2019. With about $100,000 in seed funding from sources like the Founders Bootcamp and Target Incubator programs, the app grew a team of 30 part-time staff (mostly high school and college students), as well as over 100 volunteer moderators. Trill has amassed over 100,000 downloads through organic marketing alone, facilitating anonymous support groups around identity, mental health and relationships. One of our friends was bisexual and was really struggling with coming out, and we wanted to create an antidote to traditional social networks, which later has been coined ’emotional media,’ and it was just a passion project that grew bigger than we ever imagined.” “It was never that we set out to start a business, per se, it’s just that when we were seniors in high school, we set out to just solve a problem for our friend. “People ask us sometimes, ‘How did you guys decide you wanted to be entrepreneurs while being students?'” Messinger, now a Harvard undergraduate, told TechCrunch. But Gen Z founders Georgia Messinger and Ari Sokolov have been trying to create healthier online spaces since they were in high school, when they started the anonymous virtual support app Trill. With Senate hearings and leaked documents galore, teen mental health on social media is a hot topic right now.