Two college kids raise $5.1 million to build AI messaging platform for iMessage

Series, a social networking app, has announced that it has raised a pre-seed round of $5.1 million, with investors including Venmo founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, both of whom are seniors at the university.

The chain considers itself a next-generation social media platform, rather than an AI app, and touts itself as one of the first to work entirely with iMessage, Johnson, the CEO, told TechCrunch.

Users text a phone number (Series AI) to iMessage, explaining who they are and who they’re looking to contact. From there, Series AI sends a message to the user, offering so-called “shares”—or a carousel of 10 images that one can easily swipe through—on posts from other people and using Series AI who want to connect for the same reason. Each carousel card includes a picture of a person and their question, and users can press and hold the carousel picture to start a private conversation with another user in Series AI chat, without sharing their personal number.

Johnson, who studies computer science and economics, is an innovator at a unique time in the history of technology, marked by the rapid development of AI and more investor capital than ever before. He’s part of the next generation of young founders whose businesses and ideas are AI-first from the ground up, something investors say gives young founders a head start over incumbents and older founders trying to get around and get involved.

He sees the industry experiencing a major technological shift from interactive to conversational environments, such as from Google search to ChatGPT, “where you’re used to browsing libraries and clicking on websites versus talking to an AI or something to quickly identify what you’re looking for.”

Johnson and Hargrow met while working on a podcast their freshman year at the Yale Entrepreneurial Society. Johnson said they used to interview founders and CEOs to get insights on how to build a successful business, and through those interviews, they “realized the power of warm communication.”

“We then went on our first summer to start a private business at the club and put together a company around that same idea, using AI as a warm communication coordinator,” Johnson said. He and Hargrow, who studied neuroscience at Yale, have gone through many iterations of what has become The Series. When they arrived at an idea they liked, about a year after their first prototype, they started raising money in March 2025, forming a team of eight in the process.

Johnson and his team decided to make a now-viral LinkedIn video about the launch of the series. “We came up with the idea for the trailer at 1 a.m. the night before, stayed up all night to shoot the video and sent it out at 3 p.m. the same day,” Johnson said. Two days later, they met their first investor.

The platform recently opened up beyond its college student base but still aims to target Gen Z and professionals. Most people use it for business reasons, Johnson said, although he has seen others use it for dating or finding friends. “Students use iSeries on more than 750 campuses,” he said. “Activated users in Series retain 82% through Day 30, which is higher than Facebook’s original benchmark.”

Others in this space include Boardy AI, which also uses AI to promote network introductions.

The new series capital will be used to hire more developers and expand the product’s capabilities. After graduation, the company will remain on the East Coast, and already operates out of an office in Chelsea, New York (they make the two-hour drive from New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, to New York every so often, Johnson said).

“We created the first network of the Series between the Ivy League and significantly, the schools of the East Coast. Also, we have a strong belief in Silicon Alley,” said Johnson about the decision to stay in the East, which is consistent with the trend of new founders who choose New York over Silicon Valley.

Remarkably, he and Hargrow never dropped out of college. Johnson said that a good day is when everything is going well, but a bad day can be when he has a lot of tests and essays to write while balancing the running of the team. He did not resign, he said, because he felt he had time to learn and manage the company. It seems he was right.

“Your extra time outside of your responsibility that could be used to improve what you really intend to do,” he said. “People are often afraid to use their extra time.”