Gigi, a Paris-based startup building an AI-powered social network for professionals, has raised $3m in funding from Khosla Ventures as the company prepares to relocate its HQ to the US.
The funding is an extension to the startup’s $5m seed round, which it raised in 2023 from Sequoia Capital, OpenAI, DST Global and Brazilian VC Monashees.
The company plans to use the fresh injection of capital to continue developing the latest version of the product and to move the business to the US, where it plans to hire an engineering team.
“You have to be [in the US], it’s where the talent is, it’s where the investors are,” says Gigi founder Clara Gold. “The Premier League is over there.”
From Ava to Gigi
Gigi, previously called Ava, launched in 2023, initially as an AI-powered avatar that could interact with users.
The platform pivoted into a dating app designed to leverage AI to enable better connections, yet that also didn’t last long. “I didn’t have any intuitions on dating,” says Gold. “I’m in a relationship, I was talking to a much younger audience, and most importantly I’ve never used a dating app. So I started thinking I needed to pivot.”
The latest version of Gigi focuses on professional relationships. The app uses AI to scrape information about users and surface what Gold calls “non-declarative data” such as connections, online mentions and other key signals. It also plugs into users' calendars to find out who they are meeting and what they are working on. Based on this the app recommends other people to connect to.
Gold says the objective is to enable more meaningful connections than on existing platforms like LinkedIn.
An early version of Gigi launched in May attracted 150k users in two days, says Gold, largely in Silicon Valley, where she plans to focus her efforts.
The company plans to use the new funding to keep iterating the app. “Social capital is the currency of the professional world,” says Gold. “It’s the value you can get out of your network and out of your reputation. So how do you turn that into a product?”
The extension round gives the company a year and a half of runway, says Gold, to “go crack this thing” in the US.
