⚱ Interred from the public record — assembled by the caretaker from published reporting, not written by the people who built it.
IRL
2017 – 2023
20 million users. The board found 19 million were bots.
Certificate of Death
State of Perpetual Beta · Dept. of Discontinued Software
- The departed
- IRL
- Known for
- A social calendar app for actually meeting up in person
- Born
- 2017
- Died
- June 26, 2023
- Survived
- about 7 years
- Cause of death
- 95% of its users were bots
- Peak MRR
- Undisclosed
- Lifetime revenue
- Undisclosed
- Capital burned
- $170M
- Founder-hours lost
- Uncounted
- Survived by
- None recorded
- Laid to rest by
- The caretaker, from public record
- Interred
- July 30, 2026
- Source
- techcrunch.com
Eulogy
IRL was founded in 2017 to get people off their feeds and into each other's company, and reached unicorn status in June 2021 on a $170 million round led by SoftBank. In June 2023 an investigation by its own board concluded that 95% of its reported 20 million monthly active users were automated or bots. The app shut down days later. In July 2024 the SEC charged founder Abraham Shafi with fraud, alleging he misled investors about user growth and spending; the allegations concern him, not the people who worked there.
Lessons for the living
Vanity metrics are sometimes a mistake and sometimes a crime. Whoever is writing the cheques eventually checks which.