IRL's $200M events-chat unicorn died after 95% of its users proved fake

IRL was a US social network that combined group messaging with event discovery and calendars, aimed squarely at the teenagers and young adults who had stopped using Facebook. Founded around 2019 by Abraham Shafi, it claimed over 1 billion messages in barely a year and said its traction was concentrated among under-18s in the US, who found the app through Snapchat, Roblox and TikTok rather than paid campaigns.

In June 2021, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $170M Series C that carried IRL past a $1.1B valuation on roughly 12M monthly users and no revenue, bringing its total raised beyond $200M. Shafi's stated ambition was a "super messaging social network" — "WeChat for the rest of the world" — and the round funded a creator program that paid people up to $100,000 per city to organize real events. "The pressure is to become a global phenomena as quickly as possible," he told The Verge.

The unraveling began with the metric itself. Employees started doubting Shafi's claim of 20M monthly active users in 2022; in early 2023 a former employee said he had been fired after raising concerns that many users were bots, and in April 2023 Shafi resigned as CEO while the SEC investigated whether the company had misrepresented its business performance to investors. A board investigation then found that 95% of users were "automated or from bots," and a majority of shareholders concluded the company's prospects were unsustainable.

IRL announced its shutdown in June 2023, after shrinking from a peak of roughly 100 employees a year earlier. In August 2023, Fortune reported that SoftBank was suing IRL for $150M, and startup founders publicly argued that overnight unicorns built on fabricated growth were a hangover of the 2020-22 funding boom. IRL never became WeChat; it became the cautionary tale of a growth number nobody audited until it was too late.