In 2020, Brynn Putnam sold Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million. Mirror was a screen you stood in front of, alone, in your bedroom, following an instructor you would never meet. Her next company sells a table you sit around with other people.
Board is a $399 touchscreen built for group play, and it has become one of the emblems of what reporters now call the loneliness economy. Putnam has been direct about the reversal. “Mirror was very much about me. It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better,” she told TechCrunch in June 2026.
She isn’t alone. On September 20, 2026, TechCrunch counted five experienced founders who had left software for businesses that only work when people show up in person: Board, Tristan Walker’s Heirloom Craft, Andy Dunn’s Pie, Audrey Gelman’s Six Bells Countryside Inn, and Adam Neumann’s Flow.
The loneliness economy is the market of paid, in-person products and places, including social clubs, guesthouses, gathering hardware and community software, built to sell connection to people who have plenty of screens and not enough friends.
Add up what those five founders have raised, though, and the category looks different from the way it reads. Of roughly $513 million in disclosed funding, about 88% sits inside a single company, and that company is a real estate business.
Last updated: September 2026
Quick answers
What is the loneliness economy? The loneliness economy is the market of paid, in-person products and places built to sell human connection, including social clubs, guesthouses, gathering hardware and community software. The term gained traction after TechCrunch profiled five founders building offline businesses on September 20, 2026.
Why are founders building offline businesses now? Software has stopped being scarce. AI tools collapsed the cost of building an app, so founders are moving toward assets that are harder to copy: physical spaces, live events, and hardware that only works when several people are in the same room.
Is the loneliness economy a real trend? The demand is documented and the capital is arriving, but the category is not one market. Of the roughly $513 million disclosed across the five best-known ventures, about 88% went to real estate, which is a different business from selling event tickets or a $399 device.
What is the loneliness economy?
The loneliness economy is the market of paid experiences, spaces and tools designed to put people in the same room, sold to consumers who describe themselves as socially isolated. It covers ticketed dinners, members clubs, run clubs, trade schools, guesthouses, group hardware and the software that coordinates all of it.
The demand side is measured, not guessed. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection reported on June 30, 2025 that 1 in 6 people worldwide feel lonely, that loneliness is linked to more than 871,000 deaths each year, and that between 17% and 21% of people aged 13 to 29 report feeling lonely. Those are the highest rates of any age group, and they sit exactly where consumer spending habits form.
The cost side has a number too. Fortune reported in March 2026 that loneliness-related absenteeism costs the US economy roughly $406 billion a year, a figure from the Center for Brain Health.
Those figures explain why the phrase caught on. They do not tell a founder what to build, because “loneliness” is not a product category any more than “boredom” is.
Why are founders building offline businesses now?
Founders are moving offline because software stopped being scarce. When an AI coding tool can produce a working app in an afternoon, the app is no longer the moat, and the things that resist copying are physical: a room, a schedule, a regular crowd, a teacher.
Cody Candee, the CEO of luggage storage network Bounce, put it plainly to Vestbee: “Companies that build in the offline world will be the next big wave. Software is now cheap, AI can build it in moments.” Founders who spent a decade competing on shipping speed are now competing on whether anyone shows up on a Thursday.
Tristan Walker’s reasoning runs along the same line. After selling Walker & Company Brands to Procter & Gamble in 2018, he started Heirloom Craft, a fine-craft trade school beginning with leatherworking, about eleven months before the TechCrunch piece ran. He told TechCrunch he worried about AI taking knowledge work and wanted to rebuild the master-to-apprentice transfer that degrees replaced. He also pointed to roughly half of Gen Z and Gen Alpha turning away from four-year degrees, a shift already visible in how Gen Z founders start companies.
Consumer behavior backs the timing. Vestbee’s review of the offline economy found searches for screen fatigue up 255% year over year and digital detox searches up 58%. Eventbrite’s Social Study, fielded July 11 to 16, 2025 among 4,051 people aged 18 to 35 in the US and UK, found 79% planning to attend more events in 2026 and 89% wanting events that connect them to their community.
So the pitch writes itself. The economics are where it gets complicated.
Where the loneliness economy money actually went
Roughly 88% of the disclosed capital behind the loneliness economy’s best-known ventures went to one residential real estate company. Adam Neumann’s Flow has raised more than $450 million, including $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz in August 2022 and a further round above $100 million in April 2025. The other four ventures TechCrunch named share about $62.8 million between them.
| Venture | Founder | Disclosed funding | What it sells |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flow | Adam Neumann | $450M+ | Residential buildings |
| Board | Brynn Putnam | $35M | A $399 group gaming table |
| Pie | Andy Dunn | $24M | Software for real-world groups |
| Six Bells | Audrey Gelman | $3.8M | An 11-room countryside inn |
| Heirloom Craft | Tristan Walker | Undisclosed | Fine-craft trade schools |
Two caveats matter. Five companies is a small sample, and Heirloom Craft has not disclosed its raise, so the true split could move. But the direction holds across the wider set: Poolhouse, the cue sports venue business from the founders of Topgolf and Puttshack, raised a $35.5 million seed in April 2025 and a $55 million growth round led by Bluestone Equity Partners in July 2026. Until, a third-space operator in London, raised 9.5 million euros in September 2025. The largest cheques in this category buy square footage.
That is the part the trend coverage skips. “Togetherness” reads like a consumer software story and funds like a property story, and those two businesses have almost nothing in common on a balance sheet. A property business carries a lease, build-out, staffing and local demand risk before it serves a single customer, which is closer to the boring physical businesses that quietly make founders rich than to a seed-stage app.
The four business models inside the category
The loneliness economy holds four distinct business models, and they differ more in capital requirements than in mission. Sorting a prospective idea into one of them is the single most useful thing a founder can do before spending money.
| Model | What you sell | Capital to start | Main risk | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venue | Access to a place | Highest, lease and build-out | Fixed costs run whether anyone comes | Flow, Six Bells, Poolhouse |
| Gathering hardware | An object groups use together | High, tooling and inventory | One-time purchase, thin repeat revenue | Board |
| Hosted experience | Tickets or membership to a recurring gathering | Lowest, borrowed or rented space | Your time is the product, so it caps out | Heirloom Craft, run clubs, supper clubs |
| Coordination software | Tools for people who organize gatherings | Low to build, expensive to distribute | Users gather offline and stop opening the app | Pie, Timeleft |
The venue model is a property business wearing a community brand. Gelman’s Six Bells has 11 rooms in Rosendale, New York, plus The Feathers, a restaurant and tavern run in partnership with Hudson Valley restaurateur Molly Levine. Revenue per available room, occupancy and food cost decide whether it works, and no amount of cultural relevance changes that arithmetic.
Gathering hardware is a consumer electronics business with an unusual retention profile. Board sells a 24-inch touchscreen for $399 and says 85% of its customers average more than 30 play sessions a month across homes, schools, hospitals and restaurants. That usage number is the whole thesis, because a device people stop using is a returns problem rather than a platform.
The hosted experience model is where almost every reader of this article will actually operate. Heirloom Craft teaches leatherworking. Nadya Okamoto, Pie’s co-founder and CMO, started a New York run club called Zoomies. Supper clubs, sober nightlife, craft classes and neighborhood dinners all sit here, and the cost of testing one is a weekend and a room, not a lease. It behaves like a small food or retail concept in its early months.
Coordination software is the lane with the clearest ceiling and the worst incentives. Pie has around 300,000 users, raised $24 million from Forerunner, Lightspeed and Accel with Twitter co-founder Ev Williams among its angels, and launched Community Homes on August 25, 2026 to give groups feeds, membership controls and event tools. Dunn calls it “Reddit for IRL.” App time rose from 2 minutes to 10 minutes after a December feed redesign, which is a real improvement and also a reminder that the product succeeds by holding attention it exists to release. Anyone weighing this lane should read it against the economics of small software businesses before assuming community software is easier.
Is the loneliness economy a real investment category?
It’s a real funding pattern, not yet a real category. Money is moving and deals are closing, but investors have no shared metric for what a connection business is worth, which is what separates a category from a theme.
The deal flow is genuine. Timeleft, the Paris company that seats strangers at dinner, raised a $7 million Series A in July 2024. Bounce raised a $19 million Series B. Flight Club, the social darts operator, grew revenue from 12 million euros in 2018 to 96.9 million euros in 2024, which is the clearest proof that people will pay repeatedly for organized fun. Fact.MR projects the broader social connection services market will reach $27.5 billion by 2036 at a 33.8% compound rate, though a 2036 forecast is a sales argument as much as a measurement.
The counterexample is older and instructive. WeWork bought Meetup for $200 million in 2017, the most direct bet anyone has made that coordinating in-person gatherings is a venture-scale business, and it didn’t end as a flagship asset. Coordination layers keep running into the same wall: the value gets created in the room, and the platform has trouble taxing it.
For a founder, the practical read is simple. Raise venture money for this only if your model has a repeat-purchase engine or real estate you control. Everything else is a good business that should be funded like a good business.
What makes an offline business defensible
Offline businesses are defensible because the asset is local density, not code. A run club with 200 regulars in one neighborhood cannot be cloned by a competitor with a better app, because the thing being copied is a habit attached to a specific place and time.
Three sources of durability show up repeatedly across these companies. The first is a physical asset with a fixed supply, like Six Bells’ 11 rooms. The second is accumulated skill that transfers person to person, which is the entire premise of Heirloom Craft’s apprentice model. The third is usage frequency, which is why Board’s 30-plus sessions a month matters more than its unit sales.
What doesn’t create defensibility is the loneliness framing itself. Every operator in this market can describe their mission the same way, and mission isn’t a moat. Customers stay because the Tuesday class is good and their friends are there, which is closer to route density in a physical operations business than to any software advantage.
The AI argument cuts both ways too. Yes, a model cannot pour a drink or run a room. But AI also makes it trivially cheap for the next operator to build the booking site, the email flow and the community page that used to take you a quarter, which is the same pressure reshaping how founders think about software moats.
How to test an idea before you sign a lease
Test a loneliness economy idea by running the gathering four times in borrowed space before you spend anything on a room of your own. The question you are answering is not whether people will come once. It’s whether they come back.
Eventbrite’s Social Study gives useful defaults for the first run. Respondents named $30 as the ideal ticket price, 55% called affordability very important, and 52% said they prefer under-the-radar events to polished ones. Price at $30, cap the room at 20 people, and resist the urge to over-produce it.
Run it four consecutive times on the same weekday. Consistency is what turns an event into a habit, and a habit is the only thing worth building a business on. Then measure three numbers:
- Repeat rate. The share of attendees from run one who show up again by run four. Below 30% and you have an event, not a business.
- Referral share. How many new attendees came because someone brought them. Eventbrite found 69% of this age group rely on personal networks and word of mouth, so weak referral means weak product.
- Contribution per head. Ticket price minus food, space and materials. If it’s negative at 20 people, scale makes it worse, not better.
Only after those four runs should space enter the conversation, and even then the first move is a revenue share with an existing venue rather than a lease. Eventbrite found 44% are more likely to spend on a distinctive venue, which means an interesting borrowed room beats a bland one you pay for. Founders looking for adjacent formats to test can work through a structured 90-day launch plan and steal the sequencing.
One more filter. If your idea only works at a $200 price point, you’re in hospitality, not the connection business, and you should benchmark against hotels instead of clubs.
What the trend gets wrong
The coverage treats loneliness as the market when loneliness is only the motivation. What people actually buy is a reason to leave the house on a specific evening, and they judge it against dinner, a concert or staying home, not against their isolation.
There is a harder problem underneath. The WHO found 24% of people in low-income countries report loneliness, roughly double the 11% rate in high-income countries, while almost every venture in this category sells to people who can absorb a $30 ticket or a Hudson Valley weekend. The need is heaviest where the willingness and ability to pay is lightest. That gap is why the loneliness economy will probably produce many good regional businesses and very few large ones.
Putnam’s own arc is the useful lesson, not the funding table. She sold a company built around a screen and a single user, then built one that fails if only one person is in the room. Founders who want a piece of this should copy that instinct and skip the framing: pick a group, pick a night, and find out if anyone comes back. Plenty of readers will find the honest version of this is a hobby that happens to sell tickets, and that’s a perfectly good outcome. The loneliness economy rewards operators who show up every week far more than it rewards anyone with a thesis.
