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- Two ex-Hinge executives are ditching the dating app space.
- Sam Levy and Tim MacGougan founded Rodeo, a new social app, to help people make plans with friends.
- Rodeo's app is in beta and plans to fully launch in 2026.
Making plans with your friends should be easy.
However, between the various group chats, stacked schedules, and endless distractions, those plans can often fall to the wayside.
Enter Rodeo, a new app from former C-suite executives at dating app Hinge. Cofounders Sam Levy (who was Hinge's COO) and Tim MacGougan (CPO), who are both parents, know firsthand how difficult it can be to make plans.
Rodeo's mission is to "help friends be better friends with their friends," CEO Levy told Business Insider in an interview.
The startup, founded in 2023, recently launched a beta version of its app on the Apple's App Store. It's limited in features and doesn't have many social tools built in yet, but the tool is straightforward.
"Give us your chaos," the app tells its users.
If you see an event, a restaurant, or anything you'd want to do with your friends or family, you can send the social media post from Instagram or TikTok — or upload a screenshot — to the Rodeo app, which will then pull out all the details you'd need from it. You can do the same with a screenshot of a group chat.
Levy likes describing the app as a "second brain" for planning activities with friends and family.
Rodeo uses AI under the hood to do some of that "wrangling," MacGougan said, specifically a large language model (LLM) to help with natural language processing and decoding context.
Rodeo isn't shouting AI from the rooftops, however, unlike many startups right now.
"We never called ourselves an AI company," Levy said. "It wasn't really in our pitch decks, ever."
The startup has raised funds from venture capital firms such as 359 Capital, Oceans Ventures, F7 Ventures, and BAM Ventures, as well as angel investors. Rodeo declined to disclose how much it's raised to date. Levy said the startup is still raising capital on a rolling basis.
Welcome to the friendship economy
Rodeo is one of many tech companies tackling what's been called a friendship recession.
For instance, dating app Bumble revamped its friend-making app BFF this year. Newcomers have also entered the market with tools aimed at helping people find new friendships. Those include 222, which connects strangers over dinner or local events.
"There's a lot of products out there helping you meet new people, which I think is a great mission," Levy said, but Rodeo is honing in on building stronger relationships with the people already in your life. "How do you truly keep in touch with your close friends over time?"
Levy said that Rodeo now has about 20,000 people signed up for its waitlist and has onboarded about 5,000 users to the early version of the app. The startup plans to formally roll out its app in the first half of 2026. The full version will include more features, such as collaborative lists of things to do.
"We're not trying to replace where you are with your friends right now," like text messaging or social media feeds, MacGougan said.
Instead, Rodeo wants to be a social tool to add on top of everything you're already using.
"This is taking the time you're spending on social media or online and leveraging it to help you ideally spend more time in real life with your friends," Levy said.
