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Venture capitalist Naval Ravikant has rolled out a social media app centered around communicating through voice notes, looking to challenge the dominance of text-based platforms such as Elon Musk-owned X and Meta Platforms’ Threads.
Naval Ravikant is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList.
Founded by Ravikant and former Tinder product chief Brian Norgard, the app, AirChat is banking on voice interactions to change the way people connect online. A previous version of AirChat was released last year.
AirChat was the 23rd-most popular social media app in the US on Apple’s App Store as of Monday, according to market research firm SensorTower. Ravikant, who has made seed investments in companies including Uber Technologies, argues that voice is a more intimate medium for conversation than text.
“Humans are all meant to get along with other humans, it just requires the natural voice,” he posted on AirChat.
It has a design that mirrors most social media platforms and allows users to post, scroll through a feed, and message other users privately, in the form of audio recordings.
The voice notes play automatically and can be paused. The app also generates transcripts of the notes simultaneously. The app has seen positive reception from social media users.
“The flexibility in transforming from one medium to another opens interesting new doors for capturing and sharing ideas online,” one user posted on X. Others said they found the voice-to-text transcription to be accurate in initial tests.
Still, other new social media startups have struggled to draw significant user bases. Mastodon had 1.5 million monthly active users and Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky amassed 2 million, according to a report published by MIT Technology Review in January.
Ravikant is a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. As a podcaster he shares advice on pursuing health, wealth, and happiness.
Ravikant, born in New Delhi in 1974, moved to New York with his mother when he was 9. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1991. In 1995, he graduated with degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College. In college, he interned at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Naval had a brief stint at Boston Consulting Group before heading to Silicon Valley.
