Good morning! Inc.’s hosting a party right here in your inbox, and we hope you invite your friends to join us at 1 Smart Business Story.  

Today: Partiful, the party-planning platform (say that three times fast) co-founded by Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao that’s renowned for its Gen Z fanbase.  

Grab a drink and some chips and learn:  

How their early experience working in tech in New York at such places as Palantir and Meta inspired them to start a company that, as Murthy says, she could “our my heart and soul into” 

What’s the best party you’ve ever hosted? Mine was a Super Bowl bash where I made so much food my roommates and I had leftovers for two weeks. Let me know your pick—and how you planned it—at [email protected].

Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao have bottled the chaotic energy of a generation into their popular party-planning app, with a dose of Timothée Chalamet for good measure.

BY JOHN JANNUZZI, FREELANCE WRITER

The last thing anybody associates with the somewhat mysterious and absolutely serious Palantir is a party. And yet Partiful, today’s most buzzed-about invite platform, with five million users, was hatched by two former Palantir staffers.

If you’ve not had firsthand experience with Partiful, it’s only a matter of time. It’s become the platform of choice for event planning, offering a free and more upbeat energy than its competitors. It is especially popular among the notoriously hard-to-please Gen-Z market.

The five-year-old startup is the brainchild of Shreya Murthy, 35, and Joy Tao, 37. They both worked at Palantir, the Peter Thiel-backed software company that creates AI tools to analyze complicated data from a wide array of sources. (The exact opposite of a party.) But their paths never crossed: Murthy led business operations and strategy and Tao was a product engineer, steeped in the technical side.

Murthy is candid about their time at Palantir and elsewhere. “I think we were both growing disillusioned with the places we had worked and the missions those companies were serving.” She asked herself: “What do I want to pour my heart and soul into? What’s something I can work on and actually feel good about?”

Enter Partiful. Its mission, says Murthy, is rooted in the problem of “loneliness, social isolation, and how social media—which had this grand promise of bringing us closer together—was actually dividing us more than ever.” Simply put, she wanted to make it easier to bring people together.

Tao was also searching for more meaningful work after time spent at Meta, where her job was to get people to spend as much time on Facebook as possible. Around the same time, another Palantir colleague heard about Murthy’s hunt for a technical co-founder and connected the two of them: “You have to talk to Joy,” she told Murthy. “She’s miserable at Facebook, and I think you guys would like each other.”

Invitation platforms are not a new idea. There are plenty of solutions out there, from mundane calendar apps to paid services such as Paperless Post. Yet Murthy and Tao raised $20 million in their Series A in 2022, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

“They built something that makes it actually easy to bring people together,” says a spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz. “What got us excited from day one was their conviction that human connection isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s essential.”

Murthy and Tao attribute their success to their mission and research. “There are a lot of social dynamics in planning a party and inviting people,” says Tao. “As a host, you’re really putting yourself out there. It’s not just a delivery vehicle for information; it’s about conveying thoughts and wishes of the host and the vibe of the party.”

And then, of course, there’s the aesthetic. Partiful is unabashedly chaotic. It’s nostalgic to Geocities but appealing to Gen-Z at the same time. Their main goal with design was to make everything feel like a party. That fun-loving spirit pervades the company culture.

For example, Timothée Chalamet’s name is all over Partiful’s website, popping up in unexpected places like newsletter sign-up forms. This is an homage to a pivotal moment in the company’s history: the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest of 2024. Hosted by YouTuber Anthony Po, the contest offered a $50 prize to the Timmiest of the Faux Chalamets. Po plastered fliers around NYC with a QR code to RSVP to the event, which led to Partiful. Thousands showed up. Some were arrested. Timothée himself appeared. This sort of groundswell combining meme culture, content, celebrity, and press is the stuff of startup dreams. Copycat events for other stars sprung up on the platform and it soon became the go-to app for doppelgänger parties.

These gatherings show that Partiful, at its core, is working. The app has a five-star rating with 99,800 Apple Store reviews. The platform added two million users in the first half of 2025, and it’s not hard to imagine a significant spike in Q4.

Even with its wild popularity, the founders are committed to keeping the fundamentals—hosting, inviting, RSVPing—free. But a business needs cash flow, of course. To date, there’s only one revenue-driving feature: Group Order, where hosts and guests can place an order for party supplies via a partnership with Instacart. (The terms of the agreement do not allow Partiful to disclose the exact details.)

These types of programs are still evolving, Tao and Murthy say. Future development could see this sort of model applied to party venues, bands, DJs, etc. All of which would make event planning simpler and get them closer to the north star they describe as “push button, get parties.”

As for what events they’d want to handle in the future, they continue to dream big, namedropping some of the world’s most exclusive gatherings. But as Tao and Murthy know, sometimes the best things can happen when you leave a little room for chaos.