One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the bill — the money came from Partiful.

As a college ambassador for the startup, D’Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says — it just had to be hosted on the Partiful app. Facebook events were dead; party planning and RSVPing were fragmented across platforms. You could invite someone to a party and not know who would show up. Partiful arrived at just the right time. By the time D’Silva graduated, word of mouth had made it more than just a new app you had to download.

“I don’t even know what we did before Partiful,” D’Silva says. (Partiful is pronounced like “beautiful.”)

The startup, founded in 2019, has not created something new or even exciting, at least functionally speaking — it is an invitation and events platform. The most striking thing is perhaps the app’s visual identity, which is playful but also nostalgic for an era many of its users never experienced: lots of neon text, Y2K-era flyers, remixed memes. A premade birthday party invite is designed in the style of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, except it reads, “Now That’s What I Call Old.” When the aesthetics are stripped away, Partiful offers something so simple it’s almost quaint: You can make an event, invite your friends, and the platform will text them to remind them to come.

Compared to the loud, quirky look and feel of Partiful the app, the office in downtown Brooklyn of Partiful the company are restrained: a typical open-concept tech startup space with huge windows that sun comes pouring in through. Several employees plug away at computers arranged on rows of long, shared desks. It is a nondescript office that could pass for any B2B SaaS office — except for the copious amounts of Partiful merch peppering the space. There are multiple neon lights in the windows bent into the shape of the Partiful logo. There are stickers and bracelets. In a corner is a thong in a frame — a gag gift, an employee tells me, themed around the launch of a feature that allows users to anonymously name a crush.

Partiful, Partiful, Partiful: If you are a young-ish person in a major city or in a college town the word has become inescapable. Shreya Murthy, cofounder and CEO of the company, told Marketing Brew in March that Partiful aspires to be on the level of “calling an Uber” or “using a Kleenex” — the default for inviting someone to do something. The app caters to Gen Z, but from a business perspective it feels distinctly millennial: a throwback to an era of tech when interest rates were low and startups could promise to revolutionize groceries or taxis or digital invitations without turning a profit. In those days, these “disruptor” services were motivated by growth — capturing a massive user base and figuring out the business model later.

For offering such a straightforward product, Partiful has attracted significant industry attention and more than a few thinkpieces: It’s been called a “vibey nightmare,” with invitation etiquette that’s “out of control.” “Stop sending me Partiful invitations,” GQ pleaded, saying the platform was essentially “yassified Evite.” But Partiful has another perennial PR problem: Murthy and fellow cofounder Joy Tao previously worked at Palantir, the data-mining company whose clients include Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli government, among other public and private entities. That, combined with the fact that until recently Partiful had no significant stream of revenue, has created a web of outrage and misinformation, but also defensive posturing and glib marketing. In the climate of tech backlash where many users do not trust the industry to be good stewards of their data, the Partiful-Palantir connection has become a thorny topic. “Can we trust the Palantir alumni party app?” people wonder. And what to make of the fact that this free event platform is really quite useful?

As we sit in her office, Murthy tells me, “Partiful is a fundamentally social experience, and we’ve designed a Partiful page to be a living, breathing social artifact that represents the party and supercharges the party and serves as a memory box for the party.” She is wearing a Partiful-branded hat, and a Partiful-branded mug sits on the table.

Unlike a site where a user simply purchases a ticket to an event, Partiful attendees can see who else is going; hosts and guests can share photos, comment, and interact with each other on the event page. This, Murthy reasons, is a key part of what sets Partiful apart. Another thing that distinguishes her startup, Murthy is quick to let me know: Partiful employees really actually do party.

“We’re thinking about the Partiful page as a social experience, because partying runs deep in our blood,” she says.

Partiful is Gen Z’s version of Facebook events, but it also competes with more established platforms like Eventbrite, or music-focused platforms like Dice and RA Guide from Resident Advisor. Google named Partiful the app of the year in 2024, and in 2022 the startup raised more than $20 million in funding. Murthy says that while the company doesn’t collect granular demographic information like a user’s exact age or gender, the “vast majority” of people are younger millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha by Partiful’s estimation, and its monthly active users are “in the millions and growing very quickly.” Appfigures, an analytics platform, estimates that Partiful has been downloaded 4.3 million times in the last year, with the US accounting for the vast majority, according to data provided to The Verge. When Apple announced its competitor, Invites, in 2025, some wondered whether that was the end of Partiful; indeed, Appfigures estimates Invites has been downloaded more than 9.7 million times. Yet Partiful lives on.

Partiful’s popularity among zoomers isn’t so much an accident as it is a deliberate campaign to market directly to them at the place they learn how to party: on college campuses. LinkedIn lists many young people with Partiful as a past (temporary) employer who are hired to bring peers and other organizations onto the platform. D’Silva, one of the campus ambassadors, watched Partiful become the norm on campus among students as she promoted the app. In addition to the $100 party stipends she received monthly, the company also offered $50 bonuses if ambassadors could convince local organizations to join the platform, though D’Silva says she didn’t bother with that task.

Unlike traditional social media, Partiful wasn’t about how many likes or views you got, D’Silva says. The ambassadorship also wasn’t paid, but D’Silva didn’t mind.

“I got a lot out of having the experience of hosting events and getting little budgets towards hosting my events,” she says. “It would almost be like the pay in itself was getting to connect with my friends and bring my campus together.”

Partiful also throws a few hundred dollars at other users so that they can host their own events, says Anita Osuala, marketing lead at Partiful — like setting aside a budget for a birthday fund for Libras or Pride-themed events during the month of June. If staff notice an interesting event on the platform, they’ll feature it on the public explore page where users can browse open-invite events. Partiful staff will often attend events with viral potential to film content for social media.

Event discovery is also becoming more important to the business: Partiful is betting that users will browse the app to find events to go to, even if they weren’t invited or don’t know anyone else going. Brands like Chipotle have used the app to host public in-person events, and Partiful has partnered with artists like Niall Horan to get people planning events.

In early June, the company made its first meaningful effort at monetization when it announced event hosts would be able to sell tickets directly on Partiful. Murthy says that the predominant use case for the app is still for smaller, casual events like birthday parties or housewarmings, but that last year they started to see more community events being hosted on Partiful: run clubs, crafting nights, and other activities open to a wider network of people and that cost money to organize and host. Partiful says the cut it takes depends on the price of the ticket and the event size but does not offer a specific breakdown of the fee structure. In my tests, a host would need to price a ticket at $57 to make $50 on a ticket (about a 14 percent increase to cover fees) or $13 to profit $10 on a ticket (a 30 percent increase).

But with the introduction of Partiful’s first paid feature, Murthy assures me the company has not gotten pressure from investors to start making money.

“Partiful is incredibly well capitalized and our investors were really supportive of us waiting until we felt it was the right time to start monetizing,” she says. “Even with the decision to build ticketing, the thought process was not, ‘Oh, we need to start monetizing, therefore we should build ticketing.’ It was, ‘Hey, this is a feature gap in our platform.’” Murthy says the core product “will always remain free,” but that the company could move into a “freemium” model, where certain features are available only to those who pay.

In 2023, the Partiful X account, in its signature, capital-B Brand voice, said in a tweet that “partiful will not make money … investors gave us money to help u party and that is what we are here to do. enjoy it babes.” When announcing the move into ticketing, Partiful maintained its effervescent tone as it poked fun at itself: “i guess this didn’t age well,” it tweeted, pointing to its previous post.

A benevolent tech company wanting to bring people together instead of tearing them apart, that stands to make little money but that is providing a service anyway, is a dream many people would like to believe in. Partiful, in both its operations and its public messaging, is a throwback to the era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy, where users dined and rode and now party on the dime of venture capital without much thought. It has undoubtedly made it easier for people to hang out with their friends. Perhaps this is why, for many people, the Palantir connections feel so much like a betrayal.

There is a whole host of allegations about the relationship between Partiful and Palantir, the data company and government contractor cofounded by Peter Thiel that has long been controversial. The claims (and the responses to those claims) are sometimes imprecise, but they have followed Partiful everywhere, through media coverage and TikTok comment sections alike: Palantir is the party foul.

“Imagine a Partiful for a protest or community gathering,” one commenter on TikTok said. “Lmao everybody getting locked up,” someone else responded. Some people incorrectly claim that Partiful is owned by Palantir; others try to deflect criticism by saying, essentially, that people who are worried about the connection are hysterical.

The Palantir context became a flashpoint of discourse after The Cut ran a story last spring highlighting the Partiful founders’ past jobs. In the piece, Murthy separated Partiful from her past, assuring the outlet that the company doesn’t sell user data and saying she didn’t agree with much of Palantir’s business practices. The story nevertheless caused a stir: Comments flooded The Cut’s Instagram page, including from people who appeared to be ex-Palantir, too, according to their LinkedIn profiles. At the time, Murthy herself suggested the story only happened because female founders were “easy targets” and called the coverage “fake outrage” that would drive clicks. Still, she told The Cut that her experience working at Palantir was “just not something that I see a ton of our users having concerns about.” Now the two companies are inextricably linked, no matter how many times Murthy says there is no financial connection with Palantir; every time someone mentions Partiful online, Palantir is sure to come up.

Murthy says she met cofounder Joy Tao after their tenures at Palantir, where they worked from 2014 to 2018. (Tao joined Palantir through an acquisition, when the company bought Poptip, a startup that parsed and quantified conversation data.) Palantir is, at times, poorly understood by the public — perhaps in part because its leadership has intentionally curated a mysterious aura around the company and its products. What is unambiguous is Palantir’s political alignment and public brand persona, especially as its government contracts prompt more and more scrutiny. Murthy says neither she nor Tao worked on “the government side of the business” and that her clients included entities like auto manufacturers, hospitals, and shipping companies. Her tone has softened in the year since the Cut piece.

“I understand why people have issues with the company,” Murthy says. “The thing that we always say is, ‘Look, we’re not affiliated in any way. We don’t have funding from them, we don’t have any relationship with them. We don’t share data with them. It was a part of our lives a decade ago, and it’s not a part of our lives now.’”

I asked Murthy whether she agreed with Palantir technology being used by the Israeli government (the company says it’s for “war-related missions”) or by ICE to find deportation targets. “Absolutely not,” she says. Murthy says she and Tao both sold their stock in Palantir after its IPO and do not follow the company closely today, though they do keep in touch with friends they made while working there. (Having Palantir on a resume has also proven advantageous for some startup founders looking for investments.)

“When I think about the things that I care about and the causes that I care about, that is just very incidental to it, because I’m only keeping up with what they’re doing to the extent that I’m keeping up with any of the million things happening in the world,” Murthy says. “And everyone who is there is doing a set of things and doesn’t care about me, either.”

One of the more prominent figures who’s raised concerns about Partiful’s origin story is Jessica Hallock, who runs the music and culture website NYC Noise. Hallock maintains a page dedicated specifically to explaining why the site does not use Partiful, and cites Murthy, Tao, and other Partiful employees’ past Palantir work, as well as broader concerns around data handling and the corporate takeover of IRL activities. (TechCrunch found last year that Partiful wasn’t removing metadata from photos users uploaded, meaning anyone could see the precise location a photo was taken, potentially exposing where they live, work, or hang out.)

Another point often raised is where Partiful’s money comes from. Reporting indicates the $20 million Series A funding round in 2022 was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has increasingly poured money into defense tech companies. Marc Andreessen in particular has become an ally of Donald Trump, and in June was named to the Pentagon’s policy board. Andreessen Horowitz is also one of the biggest donors going into the November midterm elections. Murthy told The Verge in a follow-up email that the company’s pre-seed round was led by Initialized Capital under Jennifer Wolf, and that its seed round was led by GV, Alphabet’s venture capital arm.

“Everything that we’ve shared is already what we’ve shared publicly. We are very well capitalized, is what I’ll say,” Murthy says. Murthy added that the company is not currently actively seeking new funding, and that the introduction of ticketing “probably pushes out that timeline even further.” Murthy didn’t respond to a question sent via email about whether she tapped Palantir networks for funding.

This is the reputational bind Partiful finds itself in: The startup boasts that it has a lot of money in the bank, but some users don’t trust where that money comes from. There was once a time when people didn’t think much of a free, helpful platform, when Silicon Valley operated under the guise of progressive values, and when Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were seen as sources of connection, not division. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, users have a renewed awareness of how they are possibly being exploited; in a Trump 2.0 world, tech companies are seen not so much as a democratizing force but as collaborators with a corrupt, violent administration. Even seemingly innocuous event invite apps that send texts about house parties now must try to assure their users that they have nothing in common with a data-mining company that works with the Department of Defense. They must also accept that for some people, no promises are enough.

Hallock outlines the tension some feel around using Partiful: People are doing their best to find opportunities to express their values, “which can feel impossible or ridiculous when so many of us are using tech tied to war crimes,” she says in an email. Even if Murthy and Tao have not worked for Palantir for years, those critical of the company believe it reflects on what they are building now.

“It’s easiest to push back against systems and companies that aren’t ubiquitous yet — so there’s still time to say no to Partiful powering our worlds, and to teach the next generation that even if working for Palantir will get you millions in VC cash, it’s a liability when pitching to anyone else,” Hallock said to The Verge.

Though Murthy is adamant that Partiful does not sell its users’ information, some are nevertheless worried because they understand the vast amounts of social data the company collects: It knows not just who my friends are, like Instagram or TikTok might be able to infer based on who I interact with, but who I see in person, who those friends know, where we go, what we celebrate, and soon, what tickets I’m buying. When I opened the app in June, I saw a public event page for a concert that indicated 16 “mutuals” had RSVPed to the event. I only knew two of them. The rest were friends of friends, people who I have brushed shoulders with without even realizing. Was I seeing a social graph or a surveillance dragnet? Was there even a difference? Partiful is able to map out connections even I am not aware of — but to be fair, so can Meta. The difference is that users know Meta monetizes their data by selling targeted ads, whereas Partiful is currently sitting on a vast trove of information it claims it has no intention to monetize.

“Is the data valuable? Of course. But what really matters is how you use it,” Murthy says, adding that she and Tao agreed together to not sell user data. “The single most valuable thing that we can do is use it to continue to make the experience better for our users. If we violate user trust, they will stop using the platform.”

Others are working to develop Partiful alternatives without the baggage of a Palantir background. I initially discovered Ephemeral Social through its website fuckpartiful.com. Ephemeral, a platform created by Mansoor Siddiqui, includes an event feature similar to Partiful. Ephemeral’s event web app is free to use and includes fee-free ticketing for the first 50 tickets. By default, events are deleted seven days after they conclude, and Siddiqui is considering a nominal monthly fee to support the suite of apps he is building. (Siddiqui is currently funding Ephemeral out of pocket, but says he plans to have it governed by a nonprofit.)

Siddiqui compares Partiful to Instagram or TikTok — a space so many of your peers are on that it’s hard to wean yourself off of it. These services are certainly useful; they also all feel a little bad to use.

“Life is complicated. It’s hard to participate in life right now and not be doing something morally abstract,” he says. “If you work at Partiful, you’re not my personal enemy. But I think this conversation is a larger [one] we’re having about the role of technology and our data is important to bring into focus.” Consumers should expect more from social platforms that collect and use their data, he stresses. (“Some of the loudest claims have come from people with incentives to sensationalize the story or redirect users to their competing products,” Murthy told The Verge in a follow-up email when asked about criticism. “That doesn’t make those claims true.”)

Murthy has a big vision for what Partiful could become: It could be the platform that powers everything people do in the real world. People plan their birthdays, of course, but some even pencil in date nights with their significant others — Murthy says Partiful could be in every part of a person’s social calendar. The company is exploring how to plug users into interest-based communities without a specific event, like groups for users to join and stay in touch with.

“I would love for people to be able to buy movie tickets on Partiful, plan group trips on Partiful, book experiences on Partiful — we already have a lot of that proto-behavior happening today,” Murthy says. The vision goes beyond ticketing, beyond reminding your friends to show up to your barbecue and coordinate what everyone is bringing. I recall that D’Silva, one of the former college ambassadors, told me she would create Partiful pages for blowout events, but also to invite friends to have lunch with her at her college’s cafeteria. Once, a friend of hers created a Partiful page not for an actual event, but to tell D’Silva to return home right away because she had something to tell her. The platform can be as wide or as intimate as its users allow it to be.

The smallest “events” might in fact be the most revealing. One thing Partiful and its critics seem to agree on is that it was never just an app for RSVPs.