Small Circles, Big Idea

Clique Clique is a private group-chat app built for the people you actually talk to — friend groups, roommates, dorm floors, clubs, teams, and long-distance family. There are no followers, no likes, no algorithmic feed, and no screenshots or screen recording. The premise is deliberately narrow: your posts are visible only to the small circles ("cliques") you belong to, so nobody is performing for an audience. The mechanic that animates it is the craq — a daily prompt delivered into each group chat: a hot take, a rant, a question, a conversation starter, generated around the group's interests. Everyone answers, and the answers become the day's conversation. Around this sit streaks that keep the group showing up, shared albums, and event planning meant to convert online chatter into offline meeting. The app is live on iOS and Android and has concentrated its growth on North American campuses — the site cites 74 universities and a student intern program running a launch across roughly 50 campuses. Founder and CEO Eli Jonah arrived at the idea from inside the industry he's now trying to displace. At sixteen he organized what he describes as the largest student-only music festival in Montreal's history; at twenty-two he founded WHYOU, a social-media marketing agency working with $100M–$500M consumer and retail companies, alongside a media incubator that trained more than 120 interns from 65 universities. That immersion produced his central conviction — that platforms built on the promise of connection had spent two decades optimizing everything except connection itself. "Social media needs to be redesigned from the ground up," he told Forbes Israel, citing the finding that 69% of users say social media harms their ability to form close relationships. What distinguishes Clique is less a feature than an inversion of incentives: friends over followers, connection over content, and a design that removes the machinery of validation rather than merely moderating it. Jonah bootstrapped the company with his own savings, recruited product and engineering leads from an $8B technology company, and has assembled an unusually senior bench of advisors — including former DDB Worldwide CEO Alex Lubar, Financo founder Gilbert Harrison, and Disney executive Jim Kapenstein. Reported funding stands at a $1M round at a $50M valuation. The stated ambition is to become infrastructure for closeness — the default tool for friendships, families, and teams, rather than another surface competing for attention.