Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the precise opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the Latest York startup is now utilized by tens of millions of individuals to plan events similar to birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favourite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million recent users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The corporate has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
After all, Partiful is not the primary party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but additionally Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs barely in its goal markets and features. Evite, for instance, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is commonly used to advertise and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful aside from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, a few of that are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that does not have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…very similar to once I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the primary quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly energetic users, up 400% 12 months over 12 months, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based within the U.S., in response to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly energetic users, which is up 2% 12 months over 12 months, and Punchbowl with roughly 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% in comparison with a 12 months ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw greater than 20 million monthly energetic users for the primary quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many individuals still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao each went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the identical time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Each were seeking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.Â
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to go away the corporate to deal with products that were more relatable to every day life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time looking at their phone, looking at this infinite feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a form of “dating period” where they asked one another what they thought leading a startup together could seem like. Among the many voids they identified was how intimate social events, similar to birthday parties where a bunch can be more likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to trace, communicate or plan a perfect event time with guests.
“When you’re undecided when persons are free, that is a extremely annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening throughout the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on constructing the platform’s text message-based infrastructure in order that the service could possibly be utilized by each iPhone and Android users.Â
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is not any longer limited to text messages and its website. The corporate launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the various phases of planning and hosting a celebration. The corporate has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invitation might be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for instance, or plan a girls’ night out with a canopy photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They’ll track “yes,” “no” or “perhaps” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis reasonably than a direct message to one another.
Party planners can even send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is accessible for anyone to make use of, but Murthy said the corporate sees probably the most need for the service amongst young users within the “postgrad” period of life. That is a stage where people is likely to be moving to recent cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You are starting your adult life and must not only determine, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a brand new job? How do I exist on this new edition of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you are also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has develop into a part of their social routine, and it has continued to achieve traction online. The corporate told CNBC that over 60% of its energetic app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful is not sweating its recent rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in america. Apple didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, no less than for now.
Like many other tech firms that depend on distribution services similar to Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it may well also profit from promotion by the app distributor.
That is what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s alternative” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful stays confident.
“We have not really seen any users which have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
