A former executive at an Uber competitor just launched an app to show you when your friends are nearby
Not to be confused with the video messaging app of the same name, Pleeth's Sup app has one goal: to help millennials find their friends around them.
Pleeth says when he was working at Gett, he was constantly traveling for business. He'd check in on Facebook when he was in a new city or at an airport, hoping to meet up with friends.
But the problem with these check ins is that even if his friends were around, they often wouldn't see his notification for hours or days later, and Pleeth wanted to find a way to "make serendipitous moments happen instantly."
In March, Pleeth left Gett, and along with his cofounders Robin Gadsby and Al Fayolle, founded Sup.
Of course, social discovery isn't exactly a new concept. Services like Find My Friends and Google's Latitude serve similar purposes. But Sup works by showing users where their friends are on a radar rather than a map, and not by showing your exact location.
Users log into Sup using Facebook and their cell phone number, and their friends who have Sup get added to their radar automatically if they're within 2000 yards.
"By not having a map we've ensured that users cannot be tracked as you can't see people's precise location," he tells Business Insider.
"Users see a radar and can see if any friends are nearby, not an exact location, you can zoom in to 20 yards and out to 2,000 yards, you cannot tell which direction they are, your friends show up with their profile pictures on the radar."
Once you see a friend pop up on your radar, you can tap on their profile picture, send a Sup notification, text chat, or voice chat to meet up.
If you don't want to show up on your friends' radar, Sup also has a "go dark" feature, which takes you off the grid.
On Wednesday, Sup launched in the App Store and announced it has raised 1.1 million in seed funding from JamJar, among other investors.
Right now Sup has a CTO, a community manager, and three developers. The new funding will be used to launch the app and build up Sup's core team in London and New York.