Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use artificial intelligence to help you break the fatal scrolling habit

Old social media sites were designed to keep us tied to our devices, our eyes endlessly glued to feeds of stupid memes and videos in order to create more interactive platforms for advertising. However, in recent years, a wide range of companies have sought to capitalize on user fatigue, push users to engage in IRL experiences, or offer products without addictive features like infinite scrolling.

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

The site works like this: It’s very similar to a regular social media platform, where users post what they’ve been up to recently. Bond allows users to update their profiles, and post what it calls “memories,” across a variety of media, including photos, video and audio files.

Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to serve as a kind of idea generator for what the user should 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, Beserovich says.

For example, if you post a lot about how much you love Pho and how you haven’t had it in a while, the Bond system might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant with good reviews. Or, if you’re a heavy metal fan, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week.

The more you post about your experiences, the better the system can make recommendations for you, Beserovich says.

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 stuff, rather than just “rot the bed” and “go to waste,” as the kids say these days.

The design looks somewhat similar to Instagram, although there’s no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a sort of cluster formation. Clicking on a profile shows the user’s current stories. These stories disappear from your public profile after 24 hours, but after that they are stored on your private profile, Beserovich said. Users can search their archive of memories whenever they want.

Bond’s team includes people who have previously created major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. The company says. Becirowicz previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Brazinskas, co-led the integration of user signals into Google Gemini.

What is the revenue path for a company like this? Most social media sites are fair Giant vehicles for advertising – This is where they get the lion’s share of their revenue. Bonds don’t have ads, so how will they make a profit?

Interestingly, Beserovich envisions a scenario in which users could eventually license their own data from Bond’s archives and sell it to companies that want to use it for AI training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would receive a very small share of the profits via licensing fees, thus generating ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider for AI companies looking to improve their models.

“The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform with the right incentive structure to get billions of people creative in their daily lives, then we will naturally become a really attractive place for people who want to train GPT 6 and 7, and all the other variants that will come in the future.”

In another scenario, Bond will use its accumulated data to serve as a product recommendation tool that integrates with e-commerce sites. “Our users will choose this experience. If we can do this, we believe we can capture some value from the transaction with merchants by enabling a better user experience, increased conversion, and/or increased productivity,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.

Bond will never sell users’ data for advertising purposes, and users can “delete any memories by either deleting them in the Memory tab or using natural language in the Memory chat,” Beserovich said. “Users can also delete their profiles if they don’t get value from Bond. As the product grows, we will offer more privacy control features to our users so they can manage their data,” he added.

Biserovich said that Bond will work to improve its encryption over time, although he is a bit vague about the platform’s current protections: “E2EE encryption is a priority for us in the near future after launch. In the meantime, we securely store all user data in our database and ensure its protection.”

For now, Biserovich seems mostly focused on making Bond great. “Monetization is not a short-term priority,” he said. “Our initial focus is to create an app that users get more value by capturing more of their memories.”