A letter from the founder

I want to tell you why this company exists, and I want to tell you the truth.

From August 2018 until May 2019, I was homeless in Los Angeles. For nine months I slept in my car and cleaned up at Korean spas, and I drove rideshare up to fourteen hours a day to climb back out. Here is the part I did not expect: I spent those fourteen hours a day delivering people to each other. To birthday dinners. To first dates. To airports where someone was waiting on the other end. All day long I watched people be met — and then I parked the car and there was no one.

I know exactly what it costs to be surrounded by eight million people and have nobody to call.

I had been carrying versions of that feeling my whole life. I came to America at eleven years old, a refugee from Laos, dropped into a new language and a new country. Later, I went through addiction, and I found recovery — and the single most important thing I learned in recovery is that nobody does it alone. I stayed sober because people showed up for me. Not programs. People. At kitchen tables, in parking lots after meetings, on the other end of a 2 a.m. phone call.

Then I went to work at a residential addiction treatment center, and the idea snapped into focus. I watched clients get world-class clinical care — therapists, groups, treatment plans — and still come apart in the hours between things. Saturday afternoons. The night before a family visit. The ride home after discharge, which is statistically one of the most dangerous trips a person in early recovery ever takes. They did not need another program. They needed another person, in the gap, at the moment.

And there was no way to book one.

We have apps that bring us food, cars, dates, and someone to assemble a bookshelf. There is still no trusted infrastructure for the oldest human need there is:

Someone to show up.

So I built it. BUDDY is the company I needed — at eleven, at 2 a.m., in the car, in the gap.

— Nakhone

We call the category Human Presence

BUDDY is not a dating app. It is not home healthcare. It is not therapy, and it is not another task marketplace.

Dating apps optimize for romance. Task apps optimize for completing a job. Care platforms usually begin with age, disability, or a diagnosis.

BUDDY begins with the moment: "I wish I had someone with me."

We are not selling friendship — friendship cannot be ordered. We are making reliable human presence bookable, accountable, and safer, for the moments when someone's existing relationships cannot meet the moment.

Companionship

A gym partner. A walking companion. Someone to share a meal, see a movie, attend an event — a plus one for the wedding you have been dreading walking into alone.

Support

Sober Buddies, Recovery Buddies, and Peer Support Buddies who provide role-appropriate, non-clinical support grounded in lived experience, defined standards, and clear boundaries.

Errands

Groceries, pharmacy runs, dog walking, moving help — and Surgery Buddies who accompany someone to a procedure, wait, and get them home safely.

Clients book on demand or schedule ahead. Buddies set their own rates. The platform manages discovery, booking, payment, accountability, and trust-and-safety workflows.

At target economics, BUDDY expects a blended take rate of approximately 30%. We are pre-revenue today, and we are raising to launch, validate demand, and prove repeatable unit economics in Los Angeles.

Trust is not a feature. It is the product.

When one person meets another in real life, good intentions are not enough. Trust has to be engineered through the entire experience — and it has to be built by someone who understands, personally, what is at stake for the person opening the door.

Eight layers on every session. Vetted Buddies before they ever book. Clients can optionally share a live session link with someone they trust.

Vetted before they ever book

No one becomes a Buddy by downloading an app.

1. Background check — required, fail-closed. A Buddy cannot go live on the platform without a clear background check result. No result, no going online. This is enforced in the product, not in a policy document.
2. Identity verified. Every Buddy's government ID is automatically matched to their live face with liveness detection — so the person who shows up is provably the person on the ID, not just the person in the profile.
3. Lane credentials. Support Buddies (Sober, Recovery, and Peer Support) must additionally hold role-specific credentials and meet a minimum sobriety requirement before offering Support services.

Eight safety layers on every session

All eight are live in BUDDY's closed beta:

1. Identity Verification

2. Background Screening

3. Live Facial Verification

4. At-Door Verification & Client Approval Gate

5. Live GPS Tracking

6. Live Session Sharing

7. SOS

8. 24/7 Trust & Safety Telemetry Monitoring

And beyond the session

Clients can optionally share a live session link with someone they trust — a loved one can follow along in real time.

Behind the app, we operate the tools a real marketplace needs: verification review, activity monitoring, user support, and incident response workflows.

No platform can eliminate risk. Our commitment is to set a higher standard for how trust is established, monitored, and enforced — and the closed beta exists so we keep strengthening the whole system before the public launch.

Why now

Two forces are colliding.

First, people are more disconnected than ever. The U.S. Surgeon General has compared the mortality risk of insufficient social connection to smoking as many as 15 cigarettes a day.

Second, AI is rapidly automating the transactional parts of life.

That collision is the opportunity. As more of the world becomes automated, real human attention becomes more valuable — not less. AI helps BUDDY verify, coordinate, protect, and scale. But AI cannot sit beside someone through a hard night. It cannot walk through the door with them. It cannot be their plus one.

The humans are the soul. The infrastructure is the moat.

Everything automated. Except humanity.

Source: [U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on Social Connection](https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf)

Our launch wedge: companionship

Every marketplace needs a focused entry point where it can build enough trusted supply and concentrated demand to work. For BUDDY, that is Companionship.

Companionship Buddies do not need profession-specific recovery credentials, which expands the eligible supply pool without lowering standards — every Buddy still completes the platform's trust, safety, verification, and onboarding requirements.

We begin with concrete, easy-to-understand moments: a Plus One Buddy for an event, a Walking or Hiking Buddy, a Gym Buddy, someone to share a movie or a meal. Not vague promises of instant friendship — specific, bookable occasions when someone wants another human being present.

Once BUDDY establishes local trust, repeat usage, and density through Companionship, the same infrastructure deepens across Support and Errands.

The Companionship Economy is the wedge. Human Presence is the category. BUDDY is the product.

Recovery is part of our DNA

People in early recovery are told: call someone before you use. But the hardest moments do not arrive on schedule — and the person you trust may be at work, asleep, caring for children, or simply unavailable. A Sober Buddy is not a sponsor, a therapist, or an emergency responder. A Sober Buddy is appropriate, accountable human support within a clearly defined role — in the gap, at the moment.

Recovery is not a small community. In 2024, SAMHSA reported that 23.5 million U.S. adults considered themselves in recovery or recovered from an alcohol or drug problem.

The Support lane is separate from Companionship and requires its own approval, qualifications, and role-specific boundaries. California has also established certified peer support as a Medi-Cal behavioral-health benefit — a possible long-term reimbursement and partnership pathway, not a current revenue assumption: certified services must operate through the required clinical, supervisory, county, and organizational structures.

I am a person in recovery. That is why I understand, in my body, the life-changing power of another person showing up. It does not limit who BUDDY is for.

Sources: [SAMHSA 2024 NSDUH release](https://www.samhsa.gov/blog/release-2024-nsduh-leveraging-latest-substance-use-mental-health-data-make-america-healthy-again) · [California DHCS Peer Support guidance](https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/medi-cal-peer-support-services-specialist-program-frequently-asked-questions/)

Traction — honestly labeled

BUDDY is pre-revenue and in closed beta in Los Angeles. I would rather under-promise here and let the work speak. What exists today:

1. A working product on iOS TestFlight and Android internal testing
2. 126 product screens across the client, Buddy, and operations experiences
3. Live payment infrastructure
4. A bilingual AI voice companion
5. All eight trust-and-safety layers live in closed beta
6. Trust & Safety, verification, customer-support, and marketplace operations tooling
7. 110+ people on the waitlist
8. 50 recorded video stories from real people about the need BUDDY addresses
9. Zero paid marketing
10. Zero outside capital

This round is not funding a PowerPoint or asking whether the product can be built. It is built. This round funds what comes next: launching, acquiring supply and demand in one concentrated market, learning from paid transactions, and proving that Human Presence can become a repeatable business.

Why I am the founder for this

You already know the hard parts of my story. Here is the other half.

When rideshare drivers like me were being squeezed, I did the hardest thing I knew how to do: I told the Los Angeles Times what almost nobody in my life knew. I had gone homeless in August after pouring my money into building an app, and I was driving for Lyft to climb back out — in a car I rented from Lyft for $240 a week, paid to the same platform I was driving for. On the good days, when there was a little left over, $25 bought me a night at a Korean spa that allowed overnight guests. That was what a good day meant. The Times printed the rest plainly: "On those nights, his car doubles as his home."

They ran my words as the headline: "I'm really struggling." Here is what I told the reporter, and I have never stopped believing it: "I feel like it's time for us to humanize our struggle. Let people know what's really going on with us as we're driving for Lyft and Uber trying to survive." And also: "I'm not the only one." That reporting became part of the pressure on Sacramento that helped pass AB5. Two months later the Times came back, sent a photographer to the boardinghouse room I had moved into days earlier, and reported that I was finally off the street.

When a dating platform let users write "Not attracted to Asians" and "No fats, no femmes, no Asians" in their profiles — and filter out people who looked like me entirely — I announced I would sue, and sent a tweet that went around the world. A wave of coverage followed — The Washington Post interviewed me, NBC News covered the fight, The Guardian opened its investigation into racial discrimination on dating apps with my case, and an op-ed I co-wrote in The Advocate was shared more than ten thousand times. Shortly after, Grindr launched its #Kindr campaign. Months later it revised its user profile guidelines to bar discriminatory profiles outright. And two years after that, Grindr removed the ethnicity filter — the one feature I had objected to. Scruff dropped its own in the same wave. Neither ever came back.

When anti-Asian hate surged during the pandemic, I watched it on the evening news: grandmothers who looked like mine kicked to the pavement and beaten in broad daylight, elders stabbed waiting for a bus — while bystanders stood there and did nothing. Nobody showed up. The fury of that would not let me sleep, so I turned it into BodiGuard, a personal-safety app — my first attempt at building technology to protect people, covered on KRON4 News and ABC7 Eyewitness News.

When I learned my birth country was still riddled with American bombs from a war most people have never heard of, I wrote about it and then I organized around it. In April 2009 I published an op-ed in Common Dreams — about being one of those Sally Struthers babies in the Christian Children's Fund brochures, a boy running barefoot through rice paddies that were still full of unexploded American ordnance. Eight days later, as Campaign Coordinator of A Peaceful Legacy: Campaign to Remove Bombs from Laos, the advocacy campaign of Legacies of War, I launched a national petition to Congress.

I built that campaign with my own hands. I built the initial campaign website, wrote its copy, and maintained it myself — until I recruited a web developer friend who volunteered her time to rebuild it, and Legacies of War's main site along with it. I wrote the petition, that op-ed, and the press advisories that got us picked up. I created the campaign's YouTube channel, and I filmed, edited, and uploaded the supporter testimonies myself — the ones I shot at the International Lao New Year festival in San Francisco, and the ones supporters recorded asking Congress directly. I recruited the filmmakers who made our launch video. And I flew to Lao New Year festivals in San Francisco and San Diego to collect signatures by hand, one at a time — 1,743 of them by that December. That November I flew to Washington, D.C. for A Peaceful Legacy Now, the first comprehensive briefing held in the United States on cluster bomb removal and assistance in Laos, and sat at tables I had no business being at — the State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, the people who had spent their careers clearing those fields, and Lao diplomats including the ambassadors to the United States and to the United Nations. I am in the official participant list as Campaign Coordinator, Legacies of War. The barefoot kid from the rice paddies was in the room, making the case.

The campaign worked. That December, in the FY2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, conferees directed the State Department to make available "not less than $5,000,000" for unexploded ordnance removal in Laos — the first time Congress ever set a dollar floor for that program, and the largest annual amount the United States had ever committed to it. We had champions on both sides of the Capitol: Senator Patrick Leahy carried the directive out of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which had asked for $6 million, and Congressman Mike Honda was our strongest voice in the House. Four months later the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on unexploded ordnance in Laos, and A Peaceful Legacy Now — the proceedings of that November briefing, the document that carries my name in its participant list — went into the congressional record. The money itself runs through the State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement. From there it kept climbing, to $30 million a year. In September 2016, President Obama went to Vientiane and pledged $90 million: a three-year commitment covering 2016 through 2018 — $30 million a year, the level the program was measured against until it was frozen in 2025.

I gave a year of my life to that campaign, unpaid — and going without full-time work through it cost me my housing. That was the first time. The second was nine years later, in Los Angeles, in the car I drove for Lyft. Both times it was the mission that put me there. What I learned the first time is what BUDDY is built on: showing up for people is real work, and the people who do it deserve to be provided for. I resigned from the campaign and went and found full-time work. Years later I built a company where presence is paid, not donated.

Look at what those four fights produced: a state labor law. Ethnicity filters removed from two dating apps. A safety app built out of fury. And ninety million dollars to clear bombs from the country where I was born.

I do not have a Stanford degree. I do not have a venture pedigree. What I have is that list. I built it with no institutional backing and no one's permission.

But the list is not the pattern. What every one of those fights actually required was getting people who owed me nothing to show up. Drivers who organized when organizing could cost them their income. A web developer and a pair of filmmakers who worked for free. 1,743 strangers who signed. Members of Congress who carried it. I never had capital or a title to make any of that happen. What I had was the willingness to walk up to someone and make the case.

That is the entire job at BUDDY. A marketplace for human presence lives or dies on whether somebody can persuade real people, one at a time, to show up for a stranger — and then build the systems that make it safe when they do. I have spent fifteen years doing the first half without being paid for it. This company is the second half.

Look closely at BodiGuard. BUDDY is the second time I have built safety technology for a community under threat. Same instinct, four more years of conviction. And this time, for the first time, I could build it with my own hands.

In 2019, homeless and driving strangers to one another, I told the Los Angeles Times something I have never stopped believing: it was time to humanize our struggle. I have been building the answer ever since.

BUDDY is my fourth company, and the most personal thing I have ever made.

I built the first version because I could not wait for permission

I am not a traditional engineer. I taught myself no-code, completed one front-end course, and spent nearly a year trying to build BUDDY with every tool that promised I would not need to code. Each one got me about 70% of the way. Then BUDDY needed something specific — and the tool said no.

When AI-assisted coding became capable enough, I started over, from an empty folder.

Four months later, the product I had carried for years existed: 126 screens, live payments, a bilingual AI voice companion, marketplace operations, and an eight-layer trust-and-safety system now running in closed beta.

AI wrote code. I was everything else — product architect, tester, operator, and the person responsible for deciding what was safe enough to ship. For anything touching payments, identity, location, or safety, I built a written review process the system has to pass before it goes out the door. Speed is worthless in this category if people cannot trust what ships.

That is the capital-efficiency story, and it is also the trust story: the same discipline that built this product is what your investment buys more of. This raise adds the people a trust-sensitive marketplace needs most — operations, distribution, partnerships, and trust and safety.

Business model

BUDDY is a two-sided marketplace.

1. Buddies choose the services they offer and set their own rates.
2. Clients pay through the platform.
3. BUDDY earns a service fee, targeting a blended take rate of approximately 30% at scale.
4. Private-pay bookings are the initial revenue model.
5. Treatment-center, employer, community-organization, and reimbursement partnerships are future distribution and revenue opportunities — not current revenue.

Our first job is not to prove every possible revenue stream. It is to prove that one concentrated market — Los Angeles — can produce safe bookings, repeat usage, healthy liquidity, and sustainable unit economics.

Go-to-market: start focused, then expand

Marketplaces are not won by launching everywhere. They are won by creating density and trust in one place.

BUDDY begins in Los Angeles, using founder-led outreach, the existing waitlist, existing community relationships, and the 50 recorded stories as the launch foundation:

1. Recruit and activate a concentrated first cohort of Companionship Buddies.
2. Focus demand on clear Plus One and shared-activity moments clients immediately understand.
3. Convert existing community interest into the first paid bookings.
4. Measure repeat use, safety outcomes, fulfillment, retention, and unit economics.
5. Deepen density across Support and Errands, then replicate the playbook in the next city.

What becomes defensible

Code can be copied. A trusted local marketplace cannot be copied overnight.

1. A trusted, accountable supply of Buddies
2. Local marketplace density and repeat behavior
3. Safety operations and incident-response discipline
4. Role-specific standards and verification workflows
5. Community and institutional partnerships
6. A brand people trust with vulnerable, intimate, important moments
7. Marketplace knowledge created by real bookings, not hypothetical behavior

The product connects the marketplace. Trust, liquidity, operations, and community make it hard to replace.

The raise

BUDDY is opening its first outside round: up to $124,000 from the community to launch in Los Angeles and prove the model.

What this capital unlocks

1. Public Los Angeles launch
2. A reliable first cohort of qualified Buddies
3. Conversion of the existing waitlist into paid bookings
4. Evidence of repeat usage and sustainable unit economics
5. Dedicated trust-and-safety and marketplace operations
6. Local launch, community, and distribution partnerships
7. Readiness for future institutional and reimbursement pathways
8. The first key hires beyond the founder

Proposed use of funds

1. 40% — Go-to-market: Los Angeles launch, customer acquisition, community activation, partnerships
2. 25% — Team: marketplace operations, distribution and partnerships, community support
3. 35% — Trust, legal, compliance, and operations: insurance, safety operations, privacy and security readiness, groundwork for institutional channels

My promises to you as an investor

If you invest, you are trusting me with money you worked for. Here is what you get from me in return, beyond the SAFE:

1. You will hear from me regularly — real investor updates with real numbers, on Wefunder, where every investor can read them and ask questions.
2. You will get the bad news too. I labeled this campaign "pre-revenue" on purpose. If something is not working, you will hear it from me first, with what we are doing about it.
3. Your money funds the plan on this page — the Los Angeles launch and the team to run it — not a pivot you never heard about.
4. Safety will never be the corner we cut. I built a written review gate for exactly that reason, before a single dollar of outside money arrived.

I have been broke. I treat other people's money accordingly.

Why a community round

BUDDY is being built for the people traditional technology companies overlook: people in recovery, people living alone, LGBTQ+ people, older adults, people rebuilding after hardship — anyone who has ever thought, "I wish I had someone with me."

So it makes sense that the first people invited to own part of BUDDY are the people who already understand why it should exist. Maybe that is you. Maybe you have been the person who needed a plus one. Maybe you have been someone's plus one at the moment it mattered.

You would not be joining after the venture firms. You would be the first outside investors in BUDDY — first money, not follow-on money.

If we succeed, we will not simply have built another app. We will have built the infrastructure that helps people show up for one another — and a company positioned to lead a category technology cannot replace.

Everybody deserves a plus one.

What could go wrong

Early-stage investing is risky, and BUDDY is early. I want you to invest with clear eyes or not at all.

We are pre-revenue. Two-sided marketplaces are hard to launch and require trusted supply and demand in the same place at the same time. BUDDY operates in a trust-sensitive category where a serious safety incident could materially damage users and the business. Reimbursement is a future pathway, not a current capability. The company currently depends heavily on one founder. Some services and safety workflows are still being validated in closed beta.

Those risks are real. They are also why we are launching in one city, starting with a focused Companionship wedge, investing in trust and safety first, and measuring the business through real paid behavior before expanding.

Full risk disclosures will appear in BUDDY's offering documents. Only invest what you can afford to lose.