The cure for loneliness has an address.

Pin 01 · The problem

More connected than ever. Lonelier than we have ever been.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. Not a mood. Not a phase. An epidemic, with the data to match.

This did not happen because people stopped wanting each other. It happened because the defaults disappeared: the bowling league, the church basement, the diner counter, the corner bar where everybody knew your name. We replaced rooms with feeds, and feeds were never designed to make you feel known. They were designed to keep you scrolling.

We think that is the most fixable big problem in the world. Because the desire to connect never went anywhere, and neither did the places built for it.

Pin 02 · The belief

Community has a habitat. Sociologists call it the third place.

In 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave the pattern a name: home is the first place, work is the second, and the third place is where community actually happens.

The pub. The cafe with the regulars' table. The barbershop, the bookstore, the taqueria where the owner remembers your order. It is why we love the bar in Cheers and the cafe in Amélie: we recognize, instantly, what we are missing.

Here is the optimistic part. Third places never went away. Walk any block in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. and you will pass a dozen. What disappeared is the social permission to talk to a stranger inside one.

MapChat exists to restore that permission.

Pin 03 · The app

MapChat turns your city into an invitation.

Open MapChat and the night gets legible: where to go, what is happening, who is up for company. Four things make it work.

Most apps measure success in screen time. We measure it in the hours you spend off the app.

The night you stayed for one more round. The bartender who learned your name. The stranger who became a Tuesday regular. That is the metric.

We are starting where the lights stay on latest: bars, restaurants, and nightlife venues. Other kinds of third places will join the map as we grow.

Pin 04 · The games

Play is permission.

Every third place that ever worked has a game in it somewhere. Darts. Dominoes. Pool. The pub quiz. Games are the oldest social technology humans have, because they solve the exact problem that keeps strangers strange: nobody knows how to start.

A game hands you the start. It gives you a reason to be in the room, a role once you are there, and a built-in thing to say to the person beside you. You are not interrupting. You are not performing. You are just playing, and everything else follows.

That is why games are the heart of MapChat, not a feature bolted on. Our party games are played live in the venue with the real people around you, and Chrys, our mascot, does the hosting, so no human has to carry the social labor of organizing. Imprompto, our first game, turns any bar into a prompt-card party the whole room can join from their phones. Crowd Oracle, Pair Play, and more are on the way.

And play earns its keep three times over.

The win condition is the conversation that outlasts the game.

Pin 05 · The proof

From caterpillar to butterfly, in public.

We named our launch arc after a metamorphosis, because that is the bet we are making about people. The Caterpillar Crawl brought roughly forty strangers through Koreatown bars to answer one question: will people really show up to meet people? They did. The Chrysalis Crawl takes over the NoHo Arts District on June 29. And on July 24, 2026, the Butterfly Crawl takes flight: a crawl of crawls, a series of interconnected routes running across Los Angeles on the same night. Trace them on the map and you will see why we picked the name.

The caterpillar was one crawl. The chrysalis, one neighborhood. The butterfly is the whole city, wings open.

To be clear, the crawls are the launch parties, not the product. The product is the other 363 nights of the year: a live map of your city that makes an ordinary Tuesday easier to leave the house for.

Along the way we shipped the Butterfly release of MapChat to both app stores and hand-catalogued thousands of venues, because a map of community is only useful if someone actually walks the streets and gets the details right.

Pin 06 · The commitments

Built by people who go first.

MapChat is independent and built in Los Angeles by a small team that walks the venues, hosts the nights out, and sits on the barstools. Three commitments shape everything we ship.