Daze, a inventive, AI-powered messaging app for Gen Z, is blowing up prelaunch | TechCrunch

On TikTok, Daze’s hottest video has been viewed 8 million times. Throughout TikTok and Instagram, the startup behind a brand new messaging app geared toward Gen Z, has seen round 48 million mixed views. Pre-launch, the app’s waitlist is already bursting with roughly 156,000 signups.

Driving the demand for this next-generation different to iMessage and WhatsApp isn’t some smooth-talking influencer or paid promoting, however merely product demo movies of the app in motion, which have impressed a youthful viewers. 

Based by New York-based serial entrepreneur Willem Simons, Daze provides a freestyle messaging app that takes its clues from social media. Just like crafting an Instagram story utilizing a wide range of fonts, types, graphics, and extra, customers’ chats are now not restricted to blue and inexperienced bubbles. As an alternative, multi-colored messages can float throughout the display screen complemented by images, graphics, stickers, GIFs, drawings, adorned backgrounds, and extra. 

As well as, the app is presently leveraging AI to assist energy a few of its inventive instruments; it plans to deeply combine extra AI-based know-how sooner or later. 

“Our purpose with Daze has been to make a characteristic full messenger that’s aggressive with iMessage, WhatsApp, and many others., whereas nonetheless having a set of actually enjoyable and artistic options,” Simons instructed TechCrunch. “You possibly can shortly kind a message and press ship, or drag the message anyplace throughout the chat. It’s simple to make use of and utilitarian, but additionally very free and unconstrained.”

This isn’t the primary time Simons has experimented with this concept. For a number of years, ending in 2022, he was engaged on an app with an identical vibe known as Muze. Like Daze, Muze redesigned cell messaging as a free-form canvas for creativity with an identical set of instruments. However whereas Muze was collectively based by Simons together with Douglas Witte and Grant Davis with Fenner Stevens as CEO, Daze is solely Simons’ challenge. 

The brand new app, which is a pivot from Daze’s beginnings as a social calendar, has been constructed fully in React Native to make sure it may launch concurrently on iOS and Android. At present, Daze’s launch is scheduled for November 4. Forward of this, the app has been in early testing with round 1,400 invite-only beta customers. 

Whereas beta metrics nonetheless must be confirmed out in the true world, one promising determine shared by a supply accustomed to the corporate’s exams signifies that Daze’s 60-day retention for individuals who have despatched a message on the app is greater than 50%. 

Not surprisingly, this freeform messenger is skewing youthful, with most testers falling within the 13–to-22-year-old demographic, Simons notes. 

The startup’s staff of seven full-time and one part-time are largely based mostly in New York, with only some individuals working remotely. 

Prelaunch, Daze has raised $5.7 million in funding from a16z, Kindred Ventures, Alpaca Ventures, Unusual Tasks, Betaworks, Maveron, 35 Ventures, New Wave, Antoine Martin, and others.