Thursday, 11 June 2026 09:20 AM
Company Update
The friendship-tech company launches an AI-powered brand portal that matches marketers with community hosts, betting that experiential activations - not algorithms - are the future of brand building.
"Alyx Van der Vorm, CEO & Founder of Clyx"
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / June 11, 2026 / Clyx, the social platform that connects people through shared experiences rather than shared content, is making a $3 million investment on the business of community. The company announced today it is committing to build and scale a B2B marketing platform designed to connect brands directly with community hosts and event organizers.
At the center of the launch is an AI-driven brand portal, currently in beta, that automates what has traditionally been one of the most time-consuming parts of experiential marketing: finding the right community partner. Brands log in, and the platform's matching engine analyzes demographics, audience interests, and event history to surface the most relevant community groups from Clyx's growing roster - cutting the discovery-to-partnership cycle by what the company estimates is 40 percent.
A Platform for the Experiential Boom
According to PQ Media (Global B2C & B2B Experiential Marketing Forecast 2024-2028), global experiential marketing spend surpassed $128 billion in 2024, up from $116.1 billion the prior year, as brands increasingly shift budgets away from social media advertising toward real-world activations. Those budgets, however, have historically flowed through agencies and large event platforms - leaving the grassroots hosts and community organizers who actually run the experiences largely cut out of the equation.
Since launching, Clyx platform has helped people create, promote, and grow real-world communities - connecting over 1,000,000 people with in-person events hosted by its 26,000 community hosts across 6 cities. The new B2B marketing platform is a direct extension of that infrastructure: by sitting at the intersection of brands and the community hosts already using Clyx, the company is now monetizing the network it spent years building. Clyx founder and CEO Alyx van der Vorm - a Harvard-educated neuroscientist who designed the app's social algorithm around dopamine research and bond formation - sees the platform as a natural evolution of the company's mission, not a pivot.
"This $3 million commitment is our biggest product investment to date - and every dollar is going toward giving community hosts the tools to grow, and giving brands a smarter, more human way to show up in the moments that actually matter," said Van der Vorm. "The investment will fund development of community monetization tools, brand campaign configuration, payment infrastructure, and continued training of the platform's AI matching engine."
How It Works
The Clyx Brand Portal gives marketers direct access to a curated network of community hosts - from run clubs and wellness groups to creative collectives, cultural salons, and film & book clubs - the kinds of grassroots communities that shape consumer culture but have historically been invisible to brand partnerships teams.
Using Clyx's community CRM data combined with audience signals from Instagram and real-world event attendance, the portal's AI matching engine surfaces the communities most aligned with a brand's target audience. Brands can browse matches, express interest, and connect with hosts in minutes - collapsing what previously required weeks of agency back-and-forth into a single workflow.
Sponsorships are performance-based: brands pay only when they activate an event, with no subscription or platform access fee. Over the next 18 months, Clyx will expand the portal with self-serve campaign configuration, real-time pricing, and audience analytics - building toward the infrastructure layer for community-first brand marketing.
Early Traction
Clyx has already validated the model. In its first brand partnership program, Clyx collaborated with Wondermind - the mental health platform co-founded by Selena Gomez and Mandy Teefey - to produce a multi-city wellness event series across New York and London. Across 6 events and 7 brand activations, the campaign generated content across partner channels with a combined following of 419 million.
"The math on influencer marketing and targeted ads has fundamentally changed. CPMs keep rising, trust keeps falling, and no algorithm puts your brand in a room full of people who actually want to be there," said Scott Livingston, Сhairman & Founder at S-Ventures PLC. "We saw this firsthand with Clyx - 45% of attendees became customers after the events. That's not a social media metric. That's what happens when you stop interrupting people's feeds and start showing up in communities they actually belong to."
The Clyx brand portal is available in beta now. Brands can request early access at Clyx.com.
About Clyx
Clyx is a friendship-tech platform that helps people build authentic, lasting friendships through shared real-life experiences. Founded by Alyx van der Vorm, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated neuroscientist, Clyx combines AI-driven matchmaking with a curated map of events and community-led programs to bring people together offline.
Previously the company raised a $14 million Series A from backers including Blitzscaling Ventures (Reid Hoffman's fund), Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, and Simon Sinek. The app now reports 250,000 quarterly downloads and operates across New York, Los Angeles, London, Miami, Austin, São Paulo, and Reykjavík, with 10 additional cities planned for 2026.
Media Contact:
Pania Kirillina
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SOURCE: Clyx