As a former Facebook employee, Luna Ray saw how the social media giant was failing the queer community.
Facebook's real name policy is an obstacle for many people who want to maintain their privacy for safety reasons or for performers with stage names, and it also made organizing events difficult — to maximize reach, events need to be public and promoted, issues that are compounded by privacy concerns and limited budgets.
Sex-positive content could also be downranked or shadowbanned by Facebook's algorithms and content moderation policies, further limiting the reach of queer content and events, Ray told me.
So in 2020, she founded Bloom Community, an app for queer, sex positive and "edge-of-culture" folks (such as polyamorous couples) who want a better way to organize events.
The 32-year-old Ray, who also goes by the name Lauren Vegter, went through Y Combinator's winter 2020 program.
"This came from my own experience," Ray told me, both professionally and personally.
The social media giants "are overlooking the needs of queer, ethically nonmonogamous and what I call edge-of-culture communities broadly, not welcoming them into their systems in the way that they do for other communities," Ray said, and "some of the groups I was part of were having a hard time gathering online and using those tools to coordinate. And I decided that I could start a business in this space and build tools for people that were my community."
On Wednesday, the Oakland-based startup announced $2.5 million in seed funding that was led by Tuesday Capital and also included Y Combinator, Precursor Ventures, Behind Genius Ventures and several individual investors.
The app lets anyone organize events, whether in-person or virtual, and users can use their preferred names. User profiles on Bloom are public and it encourages users to also upload clearly identifiable photos so other users will recognize them at in-person events.
"We want to strike this balance between safety for the community… while also understanding the need for privacy," Ray told me, but "you can use the app with a different picture and a different name and discover events and go to them so you don't show up on the internet. But that way, you get to show up in-person and still be part of the community. We really encourage people to be as close to their real identity as they can be within their own need for safety."
Although the app is not explicitly a dating app, it lets users indicate whether they're open to new relationships including new friends, long-term partners, casual dating, hookups or kink partners.
According to the website, more than 70% of its members are ethically nonmonogamous (or open to it) and 13% identify as transgender or nonbinary, and it allows users to choose from 100 gender identities.
Bloom is free to use on both iOS and Android, and Ray plans on implementing premium features in the future.
The company also partners with other organizations, including San Francisco Pride, and says it has hosted more than 3,000 events with a combined engagement of over 60,000 people.
It currently has community organizers hosting in-person events in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Diego, and Portland and Seattle will also launch this year.
"When I think about what the world looks like, or what I would like the world to look like, is a place where everyone regardless of identity has access to connecting to community because having connections with people is so critical to who we are as humans," Ray said. "The loneliness epidemic that was already happening before the pandemic was exacerbated. We really need solutions for that. Community organizations, community events are an amazing solution for that."
Ray wants to double the company's headcount over the next year. It currently has four full-time employees and six part-timers. She also wants to launch in every major and midsize city in the U.S. by the end of 2023. There's already demand coming from Denver and Albuquerque, she said.
