Around this time last year, Google came out and said it: TikTok has become an effective search engine, with users tapping it for things like local restaurants and businesses and product recommendations. So many people are using TikTok for this purpose that it’s actually making a noticeable dent in Google search traffic.
Atmosfy wants to get in on that hunger for local experiences. Founded in 2021 by former Air Force captain and Meta executive Michael Ebel, Atmosfy is a short-form-video-based app that aims to help people discover and review nearby businesses–and it’s seeing an influx of content creators, it says.
The app’s main purpose is to let people post video reviews of local restaurants and businesses. These don’t have to be big, comprehensive reviews; they can be snapshot clips of individual dishes or quick panoramas of the place’s overall look and vibe. Users can then search for locations by hashtag, distance, type of cuisine or product, and price, and see those reviews pop up.
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Atmosfy says it’s currently in more than 10,000 cities across 150 countries, and users have posted videos about nearly one million different businesses.
As its userbase has grown, Atmosfy has noticed creators who have established audiences on platforms like TikTok and Instagram are porting their followers over to Atmosfy, where those followers can then see if the creator has posted any content about businesses in their cities.
Bringing their followers to Atmosfy lets creators build “large-scale, hyperlocal” groups within their audience that they can then target for things like meet-and-greets, Atmosfy tells Tubefilter. In turn, followers who come over to Atmosfy can see extra content that might not be posted on the creators’ main channels.
Atmosfy says that in New York City alone, it has around 5,000 local creators who are posting videos about businesses across the city. It estimates creators’ video reviews have generated over 500,000 additional recommendations (with a “recommendation” meaning another Atmosfy user indicates they’ve also been to that place) for NYC businesses so far.
To keep expanding, Atmosfy recently raised $12 million in seed funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Kygo, Streamlined Ventures, Industry Ventures, Canaan Partners, Village Global, Progression Fund, and Convivialite Ventures.
The plan is to build out its team (13 strong at the moment, with people who formerly worked at TikTok, Instagram, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and Netflix), invest in its tech, improve personalization features, and expand overall offerings, Atmosfy told TechCrunch.
It also plans to continue pursuing content creators, particularly those in the travel space, it says.
“Creators on our platform build extensive passports,” Ebel says, “deep content catalogs — which give followers a deeper look into their experiences, establishing greater credibility and authenticating the local spots they need to explore in their cities and beyond.”
