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Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you kick your doomscrolling habit

Source: TechCrunchView Original
technologyApril 21, 2026

Legacy social media sites have been designed to keep us hooked to our devices, eyes glued endlessly to retina-frying feeds of memes and dumb videos in order to create more engaged platforms for advertisements. In recent years, however, a swell of companies have sought to capitalize on users’ burnout, pushing users to engage in IRL experiences, or offering products without addictive features like endless scroll.

Bond, which officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those sites. Dino Becirovic, Bond’s co-founder and CEO, says that his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans’ screen addiction.

The site works like this: Much like a normal social media platform, users post about what they’ve been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles, posting what it calls “memories,” via a variety of mediums, including pictures, video, and audio files.

Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator for what the user should go and do in the real world.

Experiences stored within Bond become fodder for its AI system, which then gets trained on what kind of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic says.

For instance, if you’ve been posting a lot about how much you like Pho and how you haven’t had it in awhile, Bond’s system might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that is getting good reviews. Or, if you’re into heavy metal, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week.

The more you post about your experiences, the more the system can feed you better recommendations, Becirovic says.

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In other words, the system is designed to get you off the app and back out into the real world, where you can do more stuff, instead of just “bed rotting” and “doomscrolling,” as the kids these days say.

Image Credits:Bond

The layout looks a little bit like Instagram, although there is no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a kind of cluster formation. Clicking on a profile brings up the user’s current stories. These stories disappear from your public-facing profile after 24 hours, Becirovic said, but they then get stored in your private profile. Users can search through their own archive of memories whenever they want.

Bond’s team includes people who previously built major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, the company says. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, co-led integration of user signals at Google Gemini.

What is the revenue path for a company like this? Most social media sites are just giant vehicles for advertising — and that’s where they make the lion’s share of their revenue. Bond doesn’t have ads, so how’s it going to turn a buck?

Interestingly enough, Becirovic envisions a scenario in which — eventually — users can license their own data from Bond’s archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI-training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would take a very small cut of the profits via a licensing fee, thus generating ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider to AI companies that are looking to tune up their models.

“The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform with the right incentive structure to get billions of people to create about their daily lives, we will naturally become a really attractive place for people to want to train GPT six and seven, all the other variants that are going to come future.”

Processed With DarkroomImage Credits:Bond

In another scenario, Bond would use its accumulated data to act as a product recommendation tool that integrates with e-commerce sites. “Our users would opt into this experience. If we are able to do this, we believe we could capture some value from the transaction with merchants by enabling a better user experience, driving conversion, and/or increasing throughput,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.

Becirovic said that Bond wo

Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you kick your doomscrolling habit | TrendPulse