Over 1,000 Cornellians are now using Friendsy — a mobile dating app exclusively for college students — to find friends, hookups and dates on campus.
A twist on the typical dating application, Friendsy seeks to form social connections between students with its interactive features, according to the app’s founders Dylan Sewell and Vaidhy Murti.
The idea for Friendsy began in December of 2012 at a college dorm in Princeton University. Sewell and Murti said that the app launched five months later at Princeton and has since spread to colleges across the country.
Sewell and Murti — who were undergraduate students at Princeton at the time — said they wanted to create a safe way for college students to connect with each other.
Friendsy requires a valid university email to join — which ensures users’ safety and prevents students from being inundated with fake accounts — according to the app’s founders.
Friendsy is similar to Tinder, but has features that distinguish it from other dating apps, according to Murti.
“We allow users to indicate levels of interest in people — friends, hookup, date — rather than the binary ‘swipe right and swipe left’ interface that most apps provide, which allows both parties to make their intentions crystal clear,” Murti said.
Friendsy also allows users to chat anonymously. Students can choose to reveal their identity when they are ready, according to Murti. The founders said they hope this concept will help initiate connections between students.
“College is an ideal time and place for meeting new people and our vision is to help students branch out and meet more of the awesome people around them,” Murti said.
At Cornell, Friendsy is currently invite-only, and an access code is required in order to sign up, according to Murti.
Rebecca Suss ’17 stressed Friendsy’s ability to take advantage of the common connection.
“I think it’s a good idea because it guarantees that you have something to talk about,” Suss said. “All things aside, you still have Cornell in common.”
Other universities have welcomed Friendsy with open arms, currently boasting 100,000 registered users at schools such as Dartmouth University, Princeton University and University of Michigan, according to Sewell and Murti.
“We made ourselves technically available to every four year undergraduate college in March of 2015, but we ‘launch’ at campuses one by one, so each individual launch date is different,” Murti said.
Sewell and Murti expressed optimism in predicting Friendsy’s future.
“We love working on this, and our goal is to create as many meaningful connections between college students as possible,” Murti said. “We’ve made over one million matches and counting.”