Partiful

Given some of the speculation around the app, TechCrunch set up a new account and tested Partiful. We soon found that the app was not stripping the location data of user-uploaded images, including public profile photos.

app of the year in 2024, and in 2022 the startup raised more than $20 million in funding. Murthy says that while the company doesn’t collect granular demographic information like a user’s exact age or gender, the “vast majority” of people are younger millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha by Partiful’s estimation, and its monthly active users are “in the millions and growing very quickly.” Appfigures, an analytics platform, estimates that Partiful has been downloaded 4.3 million times in the last year, with the US accounting for the vast majority, according to data provided to The Verge. When Apple announced its competitor, Invites, in 2025, some wondered whether that was the end of Partiful; indeed, Appfigures estimates Invites has been downloaded more than 9.7 million times. Yet Partiful lives on. Partiful’s popularity among zoomers isn’t so much an accident as it is a deliberate campaign to market directly to them at the place they learn how to party: on college campuses. LinkedIn lists many young people with Partiful as a past (temporary) employer who are hired to bring peers and other organizations onto the platform. D’Silva, one of the campus ambassadors, watched Partiful become the norm on campus among students as she promoted the app. In addition to the $100 party stipends she received monthly, the company also offered $50 bonuses if ambassadors could convince local organizations to join the platform, though D’Silva says she didn’t bother with that task. Unlike traditional social media, Partiful wasn’t about how many likes or views you got, D’Silva says. The ambassadorship also wasn’t paid, but D’Silva didn’t mind. “I got a lot out of having the experience of hosting events and getting little budgets towards hosting my events,” she says. “It would almost be like the pay in itself was getting to connect with my friends and bring my campus together.” [Image: Partiful’s office is filled with branded merch. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/06/268388_Partiful_profile_AKrales_0196.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Partiful also throws a few hundred dollars at other users so that they can host their own events, says Anita Osuala, marketing lead at Partiful — like setting aside a budget for a birthday fund for Libras or Pride-themed events during the month of June. If staff notice an interesting event on the platform, they’ll feature it on the public explore page where users can browse open-invite events. Partiful staff will often attend events with viral potential to film content for social media.  Event discovery is also becoming more important to the business: Partiful is betting that users will browse the app to find events to go to, even if they weren’t invited or don’t know anyone else going. Brands like Chipotle have used the app to host public in-person events, and Partiful has partnered with artists

“I understand why people have issues with [Palantir].”

One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the bill — the money came from Partiful.  As a college ambassador for the startup, D’Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says — it just had to be hosted on the Partiful app. Facebook events were dead; party planning and RSVPing were fragmented across platforms. You could invite someone to a party and not know who would show up. Partiful arrived at just the right time. By the time D’Silva graduated, word of mouth had made it more than just a new app you had to download. “I don’t even know what we did before Partiful,” D’Silva says. (Partiful is pronounced like “beautiful.”) The startup, founded in 2019, has not created something new or even exciting, at least functionally speaking — it is an invitation and events platform. The most striking thing is perhaps the app’s visual identity, which is playful but also nostalgic for an era many of its users never experienced: lots of neon text, Y2K-era flyers, remixed memes. A premade birthday party invite is designed in the style of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, except it reads, “Now That’s What I Call Old.” When the aesthetics are stripped away, Partiful offers something so simple it’s almost quaint: You can make an event, invite your friends, and the platform will text them to remind them to come. Compared to the loud, quirky look and feel of Partiful the app, the office in downtown Brooklyn of Partiful the company are restrained: a typical open-concept tech startup space with huge windows that sun comes pouring in through. Several employees plug away at computers arranged on rows of long, shared desks. It is a nondescript office that could pass for any B2B SaaS office — except for the copious amounts of Partiful merch peppering the space. There are multiple neon lights in the windows bent into the shape of the Partiful logo. There are stickers and bracelets. In a corner is a thong in a frame — a gag gift, an employee tells me, themed around the launch of a feature that allows users to anonymously name a crush.  [Image: A favorite merch item is framed at the Partiful office in Brooklyn. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/06/268388_Partiful_profile_AKrales_0283.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Partiful, Partiful, Partiful: If you are a young-ish person in a major city or in a college town the word has become inescapable. Shreya Murthy, cofounder and CEO of the company, told Marketing Brew in March that Partiful aspires to be on the level of “calling