CLIQ: The app combating loneliness is growing its network
After living in Australia for a period of time, Nicola Gunby and Jason Iliffe wanted to find a community of friends upon moving to London post pandemic, but like many others moving to the capital, they found themselves isolated in one of the world’s busiest cities.
Frustrated by a lack of meaningful ways to meet people, they built their own solution.
The pair co-founded the popular community networking app CLIQ in February 2023, and it has since become one of the UK’s fastest growing social platforms, allowing users to join run clubs, meet other business founders and discover pop-up concerts at secret locations.
Now the app has closed an undisclosed seven-figure investment round led by global venture fund Artesian, alongside a group of angel investors and a family office, marking its latest growth milestone.
The latest raise follows CLIQ’s £530,000 pre-seed round in 2024, which laid the foundations of the platform’s trajectory.
In an interview with CityAM, Gunby said: “It started in a way of how do people meet people?
“Then we realised, you’ve got your dating apps, your Facebook groups which are really outdated…a lot of social platforms that we do have, we’re not actively meeting people. No one’s really reinvented that wheel.”
Marketing and business trajectory
Unlike many consumer apps looking to break in, where marketing is crucial to growth, CLIQ has so far spent £0 on marketing.
Gunby attributed the unusual feat to its business model where the “communities do a lot of the work for us” through social media outreach and “word of mouth”.
She said: “Our outreach strategy has always been, find the biggest community in the city, get them to come on, they bring their users.”
This approach led to the app being tagged by users on social media in order to promote their event on CLIQ, including influencers and content creators, effectively leading more people to the platform, with more than 500,000 tickets sold on the app to date.
In turn, CLIQ helps promote events held by prominent creators and brands, collaborating as a media partner on exclusive events, including with Gymshark, L’Oreal and Samsung.
Gunby also credited the rapid growth to the app allowing users “to build their own businesses”, with event organisers able to charge for tickets and memberships to events.
International expansion
The latest funding round will go towards building on early traction in Australia after the app went viral on Tiktok, leading to a surge of downloads.
Gunby said: “We’ve hired someone in Australia now to manage it all, because we think we can really dominate the country.”
The app is also expanding into other areas where it is gaining traction, such as Barcelona and Milan, but noted that Australia is “going to be our next biggest market”.
The funding will also support product development, including AI, to create personalised recommendations and enhance safety features to create “better experience” and build more tools for the brand.
Unlike other platforms, CLIQ requires verification while also granting community owners the ability to set rules and prevent people from joining groups if they fail to meet certain criteria.
As the app grows globally, Gunby and Iliffe are updating the brand and searching for a London office space, in a bid to continue bringing communities offline and combat loneliness.
Gunby said: “People just want to meet other people.”