A small but growing cohort of founders who've already sold companies for millions are now launching startups with a shared mission: bringing people together in physical spaces, according to a report published by TechCrunch on September 20. Brynn Putnam, who sold Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million, and Tristan Walker, who sold Walker & Company Brands to Procter & Gamble, are both building new ventures focused on offline connection rather than digital engagement. The trend reflects a deliberate bet that addressing loneliness—which the World Health Organization classified last June as a defining global health challenge affecting one in six people worldwide—can become a viable industry.

The data underlying this shift is substantial. The WHO's Commission on Social Connection estimates that loneliness contributes to roughly 870,000 deaths annually across the globe. A Harris Poll survey sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy earlier this year found that two-thirds of Americans now prioritize experiences like travel over material purchases, with the same percentage saying retail shopping feels too generic today. The ventures themselves have raised relatively modest sums so far: Putnam's three-year-old company Board has secured $35 million in venture capital, Andy Dunn's five-year-old Pie has raised $24 million, and Audrey Gelman's Six Bells has brought in roughly $3.8 million. Walker's 11-month-old Heirloom Craft hasn't disclosed its funding. The outlier is WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann's Flow, which has raised more than $450 million—largely from Andreessen Horowitz—dwarfing everyone else combined.

The founders describe their pivots as deeply personal. Putnam said at a recent TechCrunch event that Mirror was built around working on "myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection," whereas Board—a 24-inch touchscreen table recognizing physical game pieces and gestures—was designed to solve a different problem: letting people of wildly different ages and abilities play together in the same room. Walker explained his motivation in starker terms, telling a room of founders and investors that he launched Heirloom because he was worried about AI "stealing knowledge work" and pulling people away from each other. He argued that America has spent 50 years breaking the chain from master to apprentice, offshoring production and stripping prestige from manual skills, and offered one statistic to support his bet on reversal: roughly half of Gen Z and Gen Alpha say they don't want a four-year degree at all.

Whether "togetherness" becomes a sizable investment category remains unclear, the report notes. Getting strangers to show up for each other isn't nearly as scalable as shipping software, even if it benefits society. What stands out is the pedigree: Putnam, Walker, Dunn, Gelman, and Neumann have all built recognizable brands before, making it easier to raise capital and giving investors confidence these are founders who understand how to create products people actually buy. The report concludes that these entrepreneurs have each guessed correctly about market direction once before, and we'll know in another year or two whether enough customers follow along this time. The wager these repeat founders are making hinges less on technology adoption curves and more on whether cultural appetite for in-person experiences will sustain businesses designed explicitly around human proximity. If consumer spending continues shifting toward experiences and younger generations reject traditional education pathways at the rates Walker cited, these ventures could define a category—but the economics of physical gathering will test whether mission and margin can coexist at venture scale.