Dino Becirovic, a VC-turned-founder, wants you to forget the feed.
Loading audio narration…
His new startup, Bond, is an attempt to build a social media app that replaces the infinite feeds we’ve grown accustomed to with tools that could bring us closer — on and off our phones.
“If social networks today are just TV, there’s a huge opportunity to help people connect in more meaningful ways,” Becirovic told Business Insider in an interview.
Bond is now launching out of stealth, the startup shared exclusively with Business Insider. Users upload story posts — similar to the stories feature on many social media apps — such as a photo of a meal or a piece of text describing a memory.
Each post has a private “backstory,” where you add context to the image or memory. Becirovic compared it to jotting down a note on the back of a Polaroid photo. These can be written or recorded as a voice memo.
The app opens to a homepage showing the user’s recent memories, along with any recent memory stories added by their friends.
Courtesy of Bond
The startup also uses AI to spark social connections. Beneath the stack of stories on the homepage is Bond’s AI chatbot that users can prompt.
When you post a story, your close circle of friends on the app can see and build off it.
As an example, Becirovic gave a scenario in which he and some friends are looking for a new book to read together. Bond would draw on each friend’s uploaded memories and make recommendations using AI LLMs like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
It can also suggest places to hang out, gifts for friends, or which TV show to watch next.
Becirovic said that Bond is not intended to be a social app where you broadcast your life to hundreds of people, though.
“We envision it’s going to be smaller circles to start,” Becirovic said, adding that the Bond team believes in “Dunbar’s Number,” a theory that argues people have a limited number of relationships (about 150) they can maintain at once.
“I don’t think people really have more than 50 friends or acquaintances in their life,” Becirovic said.
The 13-person team, based primarily in the Bay Area, includes members who have worked on major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and the popular Chinese app RedNote (Xiaohongshu). Bond also hired an AI researcher from Google DeepMind, Arthur Brazinkas, to build out the startup’s own models.
Becirovic, Bond’s CEO, started his career at Twitter in corporate development before joining VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Bond’s cofounder and chief technology officer, Hanxin Jin, was previously a VP at RedNote and was an engineer on Facebook and Instagram. The two met while working at fintech company Aven.
Bond raised a $5 million seed round in April 2025, led by Caffeinated Capital, with angel investors from Aven, LinkedIn, and Snap.
A more social internet
Bond’s launch comes as Big Tech companies are under scrutiny — with some battling in court — over whether social media platforms are addictive.
“We’re not trying to compete for time spent,” Becirovic said.
The platform pledges not to include ads in its content, and plans to test a few monetization methods. One option is to allow third parties like brands to access the app’s memories for user research. Another, Becirovic said, is licensing users’ memories (with their consent) to companies that build big AI models, which would also pay users in return. Like many new social apps, Bond plans to explore paid premium features at a future date.
Bond joins a growing list of new startups aiming to build a more optimistic internet in the AI era.
“The internet still hasn’t solved a lot of the needs that a person has,” Becirovic said. “People are still relatively anonymous, the vast majority of people are just these passive consumers. As a result, the internet doesn’t know much about you and can’t help you. It’s really good at wasting your time and not really good at anything else.”
While AI is a core function of Bond’s app, Becirovic is hesitant to call his company an “AI product.”
“Our goal is to be more of a utility and a tool to actually help you accomplish things in your life,” Becirovic said. “And actually get off of our app.”
