GERMANY – Slay, a Berlin, Germany-based positive social media network for teenagers, raised a €2.5m ($2.63m) in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Accel, with participation from Harry Stebbing’s 20VC and additional investors including Supercell Co-Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers). The company intends to use the funding to publicly launch the platform in new countries, build out product and consumer teams, and further develop the app.Founded in 2022 by a team of three 23-year old, Berlin-based co-founders: Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald and Stefan Quernhorst, Slay is a new platform aiming to promote mental wellbeing among teenagers through normalising and reinforcing positive social media interactions. It works by showing users 12 questions when they open the app which they must answer by choosing another user (from their school, class or peer group) to pay an anonymous compliment (or “slay”) to. All users can view compliments they have received provided they answer the 12 questions when logging on, while the identity of those who sent the compliment remains hidden.Slay first launched in Germany, quickly reaching Number 1 on the German iOS App Store after just four days and acquiring over 250,000 registered users. The app, now also available across both iOS and Android, has since been translated into various languages, and is seeing rapid traction in other countries including the UK, where it recently launched.19/01/2023
