The Togethera private social network developed by an ex-Facebook employee has raised more than £220,000 on Crowdcube.
Founded by Sokratis Papafloratos and Matt Dempsey, Togethera help families and friends stay in contact without revealing private information to brief acquaintances. It sits behind a confidentiality wall, meaning the content can’t be found on search engines or by people not in each group created by the user.
Unlike Facebook, it doesn’t include any advertising and information is never collected or sold to third parties.
“We weren’t interested in aggressively expanding from day one. Too many social networks have quickly boomed, raking in users but then quickly going bust once the hype disappeared,”Togethera co-founder Sokratis Papafloratos said.
“We wanted to focus on providing our first users with an ultra-simple, ultra-private network where they could keep in touch with close friends and family and share photos easily. We believe we’ve achieved that and we’re now experiencing the kind of demand we suspected would come if we got the app right.”
He continued that the company is not trying to compete with the big social players like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest because it has been designed for use between family members and friends, providing a private space for the to share messages, photos and videos.
“These groups don’t want to be bombarded with adverts or posts from people they hardly know – they want to instantly see and comment on a photo of their granddaughter from the weekend BBQ or a happy birthday video-message from their best friend in Australia. Nothing else,” Papafloratos continued.
To date, Togethera has 50,000 worldwide members using the Android and iPhone app in 17 languages. A premium subscription is gaining traction after it was trialled with some members and now the company hopes to gain more users with monetisation via the premium version.
