Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you kick your doomscrolling habit

Legacy social media sites are designed to keep us glued to our devices, eyes endlessly glued to retina-fried feeds of memes and dumb videos to create highly engaging ad platforms. However, in recent years, many companies have sought to take advantage of user fatigue, pushing users to engage in IRL experiences, or offering products without addictive features such as endless scrolling.

Bond, which was officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those areas. Dino Becirovic, founder and CEO of Bond, says his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans’ screen addiction.

The site works like this: Like a traditional social media platform, users post about what they’ve been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles, posting what it calls “memories,” through a variety of methods, including photos, video, and audio files.

Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator of what the user should travel and do in the real world.

The experiences stored within Bond become fodder for its AI system, which is then trained on what kind of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic said.

For example, if you post a lot about how much you love Pho and you haven’t had it in a while, the Bond program can recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that gets good reviews. Or, if you like heavy metal, Bond might reveal that Iron Maiden is coming to your town next week.

The more information you post about your experience, the better recommendations the system can provide, Becirovic said.

In other words, the system is designed to get you out of the app and back into the real world, where you can do more things, instead of just “bed rotting” and “scrolling,” as the kids these days say.

The layout looks a bit like Instagram, although there is no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a clustered format. Clicking on a profile reveals the user’s current news. These stories disappear from your public profile after 24 hours, says Becirovic, but are then saved to your private profile. Users can search through their archive of memories whenever they want.

Bond’s team includes people who have built major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, the company said. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, led user signal integration at Google Gemini.

What is the source of income for a company like this? Most social media sites are huge advertising vehicles – and that’s where they make most of their revenue. Bond has no ads, so how will it make money?

Interestingly, Becirovic envisions a situation where – eventually – users can license their data from Bond’s archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI training purposes. In this scenario, Bond will take a very small portion of the profits in license fees, thereby bringing in ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider for AI companies looking to tune their models.

“The idea with this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform that has an inspiring structure to get billions of people to be creative about their daily lives, naturally we will be a really attractive place for people who want to train the sixth and seventh GPT, all the other types that will come in the future.”

In one case, Bond will use its collected data to serve as a product recommendation tool including e-commerce sites. “Our users can engage in this action. If we can do this, we believe we can capture some value from transactions with retailers by enabling a better user experience, driving conversions, and/or increasing output,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.

Becirovic said Bond will never sell user data for advertising purposes, and users can “delete any memories by deleting them from the Memories tab or using natural language in the Memories dialog.” He added: “Users can also delete their profile if they are not getting value from Bond. As the product grows, we will introduce additional privacy controls for our users to manage their data.”

Becirovic said that Bond will improve its encryption over time, although he is unclear about the current protection of the platform: “E2EE encryption is our priority in the near future after launch. At the moment, we store all user data safely in our database and ensure that it is secure,” he said.

For now, Becirovic seems more focused on making Bond cool. “Making money is not a short-term priority,” he said. “Our initial focus is on creating an app where users get more value when capturing their memories.”