• UAE-based social app Belong (formerly ASKWHO) has raised a $1.5 million pre-Series A round, bringing its total capital raised to $3.5 million.
• Founded in 2019 by Michael Askew and Matthew Gaziano, Belong is a social app designed to connect individuals within cities.
• The round aims to improve Belong’s offerings and enable it to scale up further in Dubai, San Francisco, and New York.

Press release:

Belong, the Dubai-born social app, simplifies making friends through a city-focused community app.

Belong has announced a further $1.5 million in funding to improve its offerings and scale up its user base, bringing the total capital raised to $3.5 million.

The company will use the funding to continue to accelerate growth and revenue milestones while cementing and scaling up its presence in New York, San Francisco, and Dubai.

Belong has consistently seen significant growth in its subscription model and witnessed a surge in organic installs through its referral programme while also entering new cities across the USA.

The city-focused platform empowers users to foster friendships by engaging with local people in shared groups and topics, attending live events, and uncovering compatible local profiles using the discovery tool.

“Belong solves the real-world problem of loneliness, and we have demonstrated, as a fact, that our home-grown Dubai app does indeed perform extremely well both within Dubai and more mature markets within the USA. We are incredibly grateful for the continued support from our investors, the Belong team, and our growing user base, who all firmly believe in and support our mission”, said Mike Askew, co-founder and CEO at Belong.

"Over 58% of adults in America, or over 192 million people in the USA alone, report feeling lonely, according to a recent Cigna survey, and we think this is a problem that is well worth solving. Therefore, we’re proud to be scaling our solution further across America and remain dedicated to putting an end to the loneliness epidemic globally,” he added.

“Through our journey, we have consistently worked with users and data to refine Belong to ensure it responds quickly and efficiently from connecting with likeminded people online to meeting up together in real life, whilst also retaining that feeling of “belonging” towards people in their local communities," said Matt Gaziano, co-founder and COO at Belong.

“The core problem we solve originates from mainstream social apps being inherently, and ironically, unsociable by design. So, whether you are new to a city or have been living in one for years, we offer all people the opportunity to experience that positive community feeling when interacting with Belong, where everyone is welcome and supportive,” he added.