IRL

Abraham Shafi founded IRL (which stands for "In Real Life") in 2017 as an events discovery app. The original concept was straightforward: find fun things to do near you, invite friends, make plans.

Think Eventbrite meets a group chat. The app launched in the San Francisco Bay Area targeting college students and young adults who wanted to discover concerts, parties, and local events.

The irony of a social app named "In Real Life" being populated almost entirely by fake accounts would take a few years to fully reveal itself.

IRL was a free social app. The planned business model was advertising and event promotion — local businesses and event organizers would pay to promote their events to IRL's engaged user base.

The company also explored brand partnerships and sponsored content. Revenue was minimal.

The pitch to investors was always about the user base first, monetization second. The standard social media playbook: get to scale, then figure out money.

Except the scale was fake.

The IRL app was a social calendar and event discovery platform. Users could browse local events, create group chats, send invitations, and coordinate plans with friends.

The app had features for discovering nearby activities — concerts, restaurant openings, community events — and a messaging system for group coordination. Version updates added more social networking features: user profiles, interest groups, and content feeds.

The product itself was functional. The people using it were mostly not real.

Apparently, bots. According to the SEC complaint filed in 2023, IRL artificially inflated its user metrics using automated accounts and scripts.

The company reported 12 million monthly active users to investors during fundraising. Internal data suggested that approximately 95% of those users showed no genuine human activity.

The remaining real users — roughly 600,000 — would not have justified a unicorn valuation or anywhere close to it.

Everything was a fraud concern. The SEC alleged that Abraham Shafi knew the user metrics were inflated and presented them to investors anyway.

The company raised $170 million in a Series C in 2021 based on the inflated numbers. When the board eventually conducted an internal investigation in 2023, the findings were damning.

The user base was almost entirely fictitious. Without real users, there was no path to revenue, no justification for the valuation, and no viable business.

IRL raised approximately $200 million in total venture funding. The crown jewel was a $170 million Series C in June 2021 led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which valued the company at $1.17 billion — officially making it a unicorn.

Earlier investors included Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), and Alcatraz Ventures. The fundraising was based on the claimed 12 million monthly active users.

When the real number turned out to be closer to 600,000, the investors had been defrauded.