Yale Students Raise $3.1M in 14 Days to Build an AI-Powered Social Network

Two Yale University juniors secured $3.1 million within 14 days to build Series, an AI-powered social network that makes meaningful introductions for mutual value.

The pre-seed round was led by Parable (former a16z investor, Anne Lee Skates) with participation from Pear VC, Tim Draper’s DGB.VC, 47th Street (Jaren Glover, ex-Robinhood), Radicle Impact, Uncommon Projects, and notable angels, including the CEO of Reddit (Steve Huffman), the founder of GPTZero (Edward Tian), and others.

The new financial firepower will fund new hires and a nationwide tour of universities to drum up more student entrepreneur members across the US. 

Series The Social Network Connecting Users For Mutual Value

Series is a social network founded by two students, Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, at Yale, a prestigious Ivy League college. Their funding journey, which reads like a startup fairy tale, began two weeks ago when CEO Johnson posted a trailer about Series on LinkedIn.

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The post went viral in the college entrepreneurial community and triggered an initial Zoom call with Anne Lee Skates (who started her fund after leaving a16z). The conversation blossomed, and Johnson and Hargrow—both juniors at Yale—immediately flew to Silicon Valley to begin fundraising. Within 14 days, the college founders closed their round. 

The start-up is the first networking platform that uses an AI agent called AI Friends to make warm, double opt-in introductions across different networks. These AI Friends operate directly in iMessage and become personalized towards each user to make meaningful introductions based on mutual value. 

Existing social networking platforms have become synonymous with chasing likes, followers, and vanity metrics. This system began with Facebook in 2004 and trained an entire generation to equate self-worth with numbers.

Series is trying to disrupt this bias by facilitating connections only when there’s mutual value on both sides. “The problem of quantifying value online isn’t a recent development – it started with Facebook back in ’04. Not to say these platforms don’t build great communities, but they embody the narrative that online metrics equate to real world value” said Johnson in a press release seen by UrbanGeekz. “We’re 6’5”, Black, and technical – a direct foil to the Harvard story. And that difference is the reason Series tells a new story of how people connect online.” 

Users joining the platform can request support from other users—perhaps they’re entrepreneurs writing a business plan and looking for someone to help or app developers needing a coder. 

The request is made to an artificial intelligence-powered agent called your “AI friend.” The AI Friend scours the network to introduce the user to other members who can help.

Series requires a “.edu” email to join, creating a trusted ecosystem where students text their AI Friend about themselves and who they know, receiving a minimalist profile showcasing their warm network. 

The Founders’ Story and Next Steps

However, the founders’ entrepreneurial journey did not start as seamlessly as their new social network. Johnson shared on his LinkedIn profile that he seemed to have gone to a school that didn’t value entrepreneurship—or at least not as much as he thought it did. 

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“I built a social app freshman year called Mix26 – a platform for Yale students to post events during orientation week. And it took off, reaching 600+ users in less than 24 hrs, with people asking me if this could be a full-time thing,” he said. “But, sadly enough, I pitched this at Yale’s Entrepreneurship Center only to have someone tell me “I don’t think you have what it takes to be a builder.”

Things began to improve when Johnson teamed up with Sean Hargrow in freshman year at the Yale Entrepreneurial Society. They started a podcast, The Founder Series Podcast, interviewing Yale entrepreneurs with hopes that it would inspire students at the university to take more risks with entrepreneurship. 

It got traction, accumulating over 500k views. This evolved into a viral web chatbot facilitating curated introductions based on mutual value, gaining immediate traction at Yale and Princeton. With the official launch of Series in 2025, the platform has already recorded over 32,000 messages sent and received by AI Friends. 

The platform’s ability to create natural human connections through AI has already resonated with early users: “I forgot it (the AI friend) wasn’t a real person. That was until I connected to a real person in the form of a minimalist profile my AI Friend (Oliver) had texted me. It was awesome,” reported Rich Zou, a student at Northeastern who uses Series for hosting hackathons and events. 

During the early weeks of the launch, he was actually able to reach Gary Tan (CEO at YCombinator) through a user’s warm network that he got connected to. “Once we capture the college entrepreneurial market, we’ll expand to finance, dating, education, health, and more. All of these fields in the student space rely on trust, access, and social capital,” explained Johnson. “Our long-term vision is to become the largest and most accessible warm network for just about anything – one billion AI Friends in the next decade. Social connection is broken; we’re rebuilding it with AI that acts like a well-connected friend in your pocket, making connections to who you need, when you need, IRL.” 

The new funding will help Series recruit new hires and begin a nationwide tour of universities to drum up more student entrepreneur members. There is also the potential to monetize the business through premium memberships, perhaps for corporate members.

Main Image: Series Founders Nathaneo Johnson & Sean Hargrow (courtesy of Series)