Partiful meets Gen Z Party-PlanningStaple taking on Apple

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on their business goal of “connecting people directly.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has called for the exact opposite.

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, despite parityful survival, five years later, New York startups are now being used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housework, weddings and more.

The app is a favorite for ages 20-30, and has added 2 million new users since January, CEO Murthy, who is a farewell CEO, told CNBC. The company has never revealed the exact foundation of its monthly users.

Since then, it has attracted significant attention on social media. appleIt was known for replicating features from popular apps on iPhones, and launched its own event planning service in February, with the startup posting jokes about “imitation” on its X account.

Of course, Partiful is not an app to plan your first party. It competes not only with Apple’s invitations, but also with Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and more.

Each service has slightly different target markets and features. For example, Evite uses the “freemium” model. This model paywalls specific invitation designs and other features. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.

Apart from competitors and appealing to the Gen Z user base are often humorous and casual designs, some of which are created by in-house designers at Partiful.

“My friend invited me to a special gathering.

In the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400%, with nine out of nine of the 10 users of the US-based app, according to estimates provided to CNBC. It is compared with EventBrite’s Punchbowl, which has 4.4 million active users per month, up 2% from the previous year, and about 85,000 users per month, is down about 2% compared to a year ago. An Evite spokesman told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million active users per month in the first quarter of 2025.

It is unknown how many people still use Facebook’s once popular event planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Metashut down the standalone app.

Both Mercy and Tao went to Princeton University, Palantir Technologies At the same time, they did not meet until later introduced by mutual friends. Both were trying to move towards the consumer side of technology.

After that, TAO, a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that are likely to be related to everyday life. He also said that social media companies’ goal of attracting users to their apps can sometimes create “perverse incentives.”

“For me, it didn’t make much sense to me personally to drive more people to stare at their phones and peck at this endless content bait,” said Tao, Partful’s technical chief and self-proclaimed “avid party planner.”

Meta declined to comment.

Tao and Mercy went through a kind of “dating period,” where they asked each other what they thought it would look like to lead a startup together. Some of the voids they identified were still planned in text chains that made it difficult for hosts to track, communicate or plan ideal event times with guests.

“If people don’t know when they’re free, that’s a real annoying issue,” Mercy said.

She and Tao made a leap.

With few face-to-face events occurring during the 2020 lockdown, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text-message-based infrastructure so that both iPhone and Android users can use the service.

Partiful’s team, now 25 years old, runs in downtown Brooklyn. This service is no longer limited to text messages and its websites. The company launched apps for iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful serves as a one-stop destination for organizing different stages of party planning and hosting. The company reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

What makes patentability fun for users is how customizable the invitation is.

Hosts can, for example, create free birthday invitations with lime green parody covers of Charli XCX’s “Brat” album, or plan a girl’s night with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. Under the portraits of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, you can track RSVPs for “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe” and invited guests can use the “Boop” feature to send random emojis rather than direct messages to each other.

Party planners can also send uniform text blasts to groups before and after events, and manage in-app photo albums to upload memories.

While Partiful is available to anyone, Murthy said the company needs the most services among younger users during the “post-graduation” period. It is the stage where people are moving to new cities and leaving their established university friends groups.

“You’re starting an adult life and said, ‘How can I rent an apartment? How can I do a new job? How can I exist in this new version of myself?” “Additionally, you also need to rebuild your entire social circle.”

Because of user-based hosts and parties, Partiful has become part of their social routine and continues to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of active app users checked their Paris-ful checks every week.

When it comes to Apple, Partiful is still not sweating its new rival.

Apple Invites requires users to have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, but it’s free if the guest doesn’t have an Apple account. The service starts at 99 cents a month in the US. Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

Partiful is free for the time being, at least for now.

Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with a much larger counterpart. Partiful could potentially lose some users to Apple, but it could also benefit from promotions from app distributors.

That’s what happened in 2024 when Partiful was named a finalist in Cultural Impact at Apple’s App Store Awards and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app continued to select “Editor Selection” in the App Store when it was published.

For now, Partiful is confident.

“I have never actually seen a Paris-full left user for an Apple invitation,” Mercy said.

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