AI social search for women & gender-expansive folks

Hey Diemers,

I’m thrilled to share some incredible news – Diem raised our Seed+ round of funding! 🎉 This milestone is a testament to not only the hard work of our team, but also the unwavering support we’ve received from amazing users like you.

Since our public launch in May 2023, Diem has grown considerably and achieved some pretty epic milestones. Since then we’ve:

• Launched a less-biased AI search experience that’s trained on more inclusive datasets and scaled our user base of social searchers by 1,100% in the last year
• Launched our first revenue-generating features, on track to hit $500k ARR in Q2.
• We have partnered with incredible brands & organizations such as: FEMINIST, National Domestic Violence Hotline, Julie, JP Morgan, Girlboss, Meta, Bumble, Seed and Diane Von Furstenberg.
• Featured in Techcrunch, Business Insider, MSNBC, Girlboss, Inc. Magazine, i-D, Hypebae & Forbes.

We owe much of this growth to you. All your searching with Diem, testing, referring friends, giving us feedback, promoting the app in videos, replying to fellow Diemers—every single one of those things is why we’re proudly standing here today.

The impact of your advocacy cannot be understated, so, as a token of our appreciation, we are offering you a unique opportunity to become an even bigger part of the Diem story. We’ve allocated some of our Seed+ raise for you to invest in Diem! This means you can share in our growth and success on the same terms as our venture capital investors. You can invest as much as you like—that can be as small as $100 or into the thousands. We’re partnering with Wefunder— the leading SEC-registered funding platform— to facilitate all investments. On our offering page, there are different tiers that unlock various perks from us as a token of our appreciation. By investing, not only do you support Diem, but our hope is that your own investment will grow as we do! We’re strong believers in Diemers like you having the opportunity to own slice of the internet that you’re helping to shape.

If you’re a Diemer already, you likely don’t need me to sell you on why Diem is more important now than ever before. Still, as the co-founder, I wanted to share with you why our team of nine women are so committed to bringing Diem to millions of you around the world.

Let’s start with the macro-environment: The way we currently experience the social internet is largely the product of advertising revenue streams that dominate our search and social experiences, and currently mirrors the way women are viewed and treated offline. Online search tools like Google don’t account for the gender data gap, and therefore aren’t built for women’s issues in mind. This gender data gap is also reflected in the bias we see across algorithms and now generative AI models. We believe (and have witnessed in Diem’s app) that searching for personal questions—however serious or silly—often requires a conversation. We often find Diemers are seeking validation in their lived experiences, not just the hard facts that show up in a Google search. You can read our full research report on this here.

Furthermore, the young male founders of giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today are not the primary targets (online or offline) of legislation, harassment, revenge porn, racism, sexual assault and violence. The new Meta policies following in X’s footsteps combined with the shenanigans of the TikTok PR stunt do not instill confidence that these platforms take our reality seriously, inspite of the proven negative revenue impact to platforms that don’t prioritize moderation. We see the results of not proactively prioritizing design that protects our safety or reducing bias in algorithms, every day. For example, last year, Dublin City University researchers set up experimental social media accounts. All accounts that identified as belonging to males received anti-feminist extremist content within 23 minutes. When the account watched the content, the amount rapidly increased to 75% of videos served relating to anti-equality messaging and the submission of women.

Those of us who are at risk of experiencing harassment & the impact of data bias are in a stronger position to design safer spaces and experiences inspired by our lived experiences and make these products better for everyone, not just us. But… we don’t get funded. Last year only 1.7% of all venture capital went to female founders. Through sheer personal grit and determination, Diem is one of that 1.7%. Over the last couple of years we have raised $5M which, while it’s not a small amount of money by any means, is still very little in comparison to our male-founded competitors. The disparity in funding of more diverse consumer internet founders is why we have still not seen how much safer and more lucrative the future of the internet can be when it’s designed and built thoughtfully through the female lens at scale.

Beyond the initial social search engine you can use today, our vision for Diem is much bigger. We want to become a generational technology company, starting with becoming the front door to the internet for you—think a browser and discovery engine, all powered by the communities that utilize Diem and an AI trained on less bias datasets. The internet needs to be built with your privacy and safety in mind, and we’re excited to take on this challenge.

That’s why we’re inviting you behind the scenes of building Diem to have your direct input as we test new ideas. Whether you decide to invest or not, I want to personally thank each and every one of you for your support 💗. Your belief in Diem fuels our drive to get better every day. We’re incredibly excited about what the future holds and can’t wait to share this journey with you.

Here’s to our shared success! 🚀

Emma

(And team Diem: Nalina, Sarah, Amy, Kate, Genevieve, Joelyn, Kianna & Monica)