Rent a Cyber ​​Friend will pay you to talk to strangers online and will showcase its platform at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Francesco Vitale would be the first to admit it when his co-founder Chris Siamitis first introduced it Hire a cyber friendHe didn’t quite understand the idea.

“Who would pay someone to talk to someone?” Vitale told TechCrunch. “But Chris was adamant. Chris is a millennial, and I’m a Gen Xer, so it wasn’t easy for me to understand his vision.”

Vitale has worked with Siametis for nearly two decades. They ran 48 moviesthat International Short Film Festival (Vitaly is also a film producer.) So he made a confident move to trust his collaborator with an idea he couldn’t shake: a video chat platform where people could pay per minute to have a casual conversation with an “online friend.”

Rent a Friend E-commerce has grown to 3 million registered users without raising venture capital or spending any money on marketing. The company doesn’t even have social media because it’s too understaffed to devote resources to it. Startup is part of The emerging battlefield It will be presented in TechCrunch disabled 2025 End of this month in San Francisco.

The company’s rapid growth proved Vitaly’s first reactions wrong, but as he used the product himself, he began to realize that there was a big market for human communication — especially at a time when people were paying to talk to AI robots.

“Loneliness is the biggest disease in the world right now,” Vitale said. “Millions feel lonely, out of work or searching for purpose. So, we built a platform where human time has value again, and a place where being human matters.”

Online friends are first scanned to verify their identity, and then they can set a price per minute to charge for their conversations; The platform keeps 20% of this fee. People don’t just pay for companionship. Some online friends charge a higher price if they are academics or vetted experts in a particular subject area, or if they speak a particular language that the user wants to practice.

For any social media platform — especially one that connects people in real-time video chats — security and content moderation is a challenge. Vitale points out that the platform has a blocking feature, but as the company continues to grow, it will need to invest more in maintaining a healthy environment. Next on the product roadmap, he said, is a more robust and efficient system for screening potential cyber friends more quickly and comprehensively.

The turning point for Vitaly came shortly after the company’s launch when he connected with a 19-year-old from China. He noticed that this person was one of the most active users of the site, and he was spending $200 a day to talk to people. Vitale rigged the site so that he was the only online friend available and took the opportunity to ask the user about his experience without revealing that he founded the company.

“He said, ‘I don’t feel safe going out to the mall and meeting strangers, but this location gives me the possibility to exchange culture and meet people from all over the world,’” Vitale recalls, “and that was the first moment I realized we have something here.”

He still believes that the connections people make in person cannot be replaced. But it’s on the Internet where people get sucked Addiction or dangerous His connections are with AI chatbots that are designed to maximize engagement, and this step towards humanity means something to him.

If you want to learn more about Rent a Cyber ​​Friend from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of others, hearing their thoughts, and hearing from guest speakers in four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29, in San Francisco. Learn more here.