Haverford School Alums Raise $750K For New College Student App

HAVERFORD, PA — Three members of the Haverford School's Class of 2020 are looking to offer new and current college students a better way to connect digitally and in real life than the current options.

After generating $750,000 in investment funds and more than a year of work, David Graham, Jon Krouse, and Chris Tsetsekos are getting ready to launch FuzeMee.

FuzeMee is a soon-to-be released app that will help college students find friends, roommates, events, clubs, and more.

The FuzeMee team and their friends, all from the Philadelphia region, found Facebook groups for their respective colleges to be lacking when they were accepted into school.

"We were seeing how impersonal the groups were," Krouse said in speaking with Patch on behalf of the team.

Facebook has been losing popularity among students, and the team wanted to make sure they were solving a problem students see when using Facebook.

They surveyed 2,000 students and found 75 percent of respondents have only Facebook to connect with potential peers and friends at their schools. Additionally, 97 percent of respondents said they don't actively post on student Facebook groups.

"From there we built FuzeMee and the way it's different is it's a centralized platform for college students," Krouse said.

Without the noise often found on Facebook feeds, FuzeMee allows students to see what's going on around campus in its own feed.

Users can find the best possible matches for friends and roommates based on various criteria, which can be filtered for ideal results. From interests, to majors, to proximity, FuzeMee's database of students will allow users to maximize their college friend circle and more.

Users can also find events and clubs via FuzeMee, among other aspects of college life.

The app is nearly ready to launch after the team began working on it in June last year.

They recently hired their second developer and are planning to bring on a third in September.

This is all possible by way of investors putting faith into the team.

Krouse, Graham, and Tsetsekos started reaching out to the Haverford School's alumni network and the universities they plan to attend for investors.

Once a few investors got on board, more joined in.

Krouse said that's due in part to how much progress the team is making in developing the app.

But one thing the investors wanted to match their financial capital was the team's human capital.

The team works about 10 hours a day, sometimes more depending on deadlines, and plan to take a gap year before starting college to work on rolling out the app and spreading it to as many schools as possible.

The initial launch will be at Tufts University, where Tsetsekos will attend. He, Graham, and Krouse will head to Tufts in a few weeks for in-person marketing to Tufts students.

Wake Forrest University — where Krouse will study — will be the second school FuzeMee comes to, ideally with more know-how and feedback after the Tufts launch.

Graham will attend Ohio State University.

The app will roll out at colleges and universities one-by-one, which will be made simpler by the app's 5,000 ambassadors across the nation. These ambassadors are helping spread the work about FuzeMee and only began with a few of the team's friends, showing the app is catching the eyes of new and current college students nationwide.

Part of the app's allure is its "for us, by us" model: the team are all recent high school graduates and thus know what their cohort wants when it comes to social media impacting real life.

And FuzeMee already has partners that impact communities positively.

They have teamed up with OneLove, Team Impact, and Juno.

OneLove helps young people engage in healthy relationships by educating them on topics such as consent, manipulation, honesty, and more.

Team Impact pairs children who are unable to socialize due to illnesses or disabilities with college sports teams to help bolster their confidence and social skills.

And Juno is a national student loan group that seeks to provide loan help to students.

All three groups have a mutual relationship with FuzeMee, with the four entities sharing one another's information on their respective platforms.

Learn more about FuzeMee here.