Here's how a recent Stanford grad is trying to transform how influencers and fans interact

You've long been able to follow your favorite influencers on Twitter and Instragram, but a nascent startup is promising a new way to interact with them that could change how we experience entertainment.

With Kangaroo, a smartphone app, you can connect with such celebrities virtually, via a digital persona or avatar. The influencers create interactive stories in which they and their fans act out parts. Fans can also create custom stories of their own.

"We empower fans to play and create with the likeness of our celebrity partners," Katie Mishra, CEO of Pili Studios Inc., the company behind Kangaroo, told the Business Journal.

Although just a student when she founded Palo Alto-based Pili, Mishra had some seasoned help when she launched the company two years ago. Co-founder Maria Zlatkova previously worked at Meta Platforms Inc., where she helped develop the Stories feature on the company's Instagram app. Kiernan Shipka, Pili's other co-founder, is an actress who played the lead role on "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," as well as being a popular influencer with more than eight million followers on Instagram.

Before launching Kangaroo in beta test form last October, the trio did some research to figure out what influencer followers might want in an app. They ended up interviewing more than 4,000 of Shipka's fans.

Since the app's launch, Mishra and her co-founders have been focusing on luring additional influencers to it. Kangaroo recently added an avatar based on PuffPuff, a fictional penguin character that has more than three million TikTok followers, and Woodies, a collection of popular cartoon characters used in their own interactive stories that are sold as a non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Right now, the company is focusing on building its user base rather than on revenue, Mishra said. Kangaroo has an ongoing waitlist for its beta program. Its influencer and celebrity partners can each invite up to a thousand users to the app, she said.

Mishra, who recently graduated from Stanford, tentatively plans to have Pili to take a percentage fee from in-app transactions, such as when users pay to boost their popularity or buy outfits for their avatars. Most transactions will be based in U.S. dollars, though the company plans to eventually accept cryptocurrency payments, she said.

So far, Pili has raised $3.3 million in venture funding, including $3 million in seed funding this past April, from investors including Human Capital and Greylock Partners.

Mishra thinks her company has the potential to be a next-generation media company.

"If we can capture that value of people creating on our platform, we see that ultimately being worth a lot of money and dominating the Hollywood ecosystem," she said.