Eliza Wu and Jake Xia are building a new map for Gen Z.
Their startup, Corner, has built a social mapping app that seeks to rival restaurant review stalwarts like Yelp and Tripadvisor. Corner’s map doesn’t give you directions — like Google or Apple Maps — but rather offers a new way to find places like restaurants, clubs, shops, and other small businesses that other app users have vetted.
Founded in 2022, Corner’s map only has places that users have added themselves. That was a core product decision that Corner CEO Wu said went against some advice the two cofounders received, like “just scrape the internet.” They wanted to have the app’s Gen Z users build the map from the ground up. Three years later, the map has over 275,000 unique places saved.
Corner finds itself at a crossroads of several trends swirling in social tech right now.
For one, it’s building a social platform specifically for Gen Z, a demographic nearly every platform is after. It also joins a growing pool of restaurant discovery apps like Beli and Places (a spinoff of exclusive dating app Raya), as well as the various social apps geared more toward in-real-life (IRL) experiences than online scrolling.
One way Corner is differentiating itself is that the place descriptions on the app are driven by its Gen Z users.
“If Google describes this place as a ‘$$ cocktail bar with tapas,’ Gen Z might describe it as a ‘performative male wine bar to break someone’s heart,'” Wu told Business Insider.
On Corner, there are no star ratings — they don’t “give you that emotional connection,” CTO Xia said — and users are encouraged to categorize their reviews into lists that are somewhere between an Infatuation list of the best spots in a city and a Pinterest mood board. Inside the app, there’s a feed of other users’ recent reviews of places ranging from cafés to vintage shops to a good spot to watch the sunset.
The app now has about 55,000 users across 450 cities, with hubs in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Seoul.
A classic tech tale, Corner’s founders first met in 2021 through Twitter. Wu had recently left her job in private equity, and Xia later dropped out of college once Corner got its first term sheets from venture capitalists. The team left San Francisco and moved to New York City in October. There, Wu and Xia share an apartment in a sixth-floor walkup, which also functions as the company’s office.
Corner exclusively told Business Insider that it has raised a total of $3.75 million across two rounds from VC funds like Abstract Ventures, Tapestry, and 1517, as well as angel investors like Partiful cofounder Shreya Murthy.
“Everybody has friends that they like who they think have good taste in restaurants, or friends that have good taste in hotels, or cool places to go visit,” said Ramtin Naimi, founder of Abstract Ventures, who led Corner’s seed round. “Of everything else that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen this idea tried a dozen times in the last 10 years, this was the best execution I’d seen.”
What a Gen Z map looks like
Corner feels like a blend of Google Maps, Yelp, Pinterest, and Instagram. While the app opens to a map (which was built using Mapbox), it also has profiles where you can see photos, reviews, and lists each user has posted.
The design is meant to appeal to Gen Z, who often rely on social media to find new places. An Eater and Vox Media survey this year found that 77% of Gen Z respondents said they discovered new restaurants on social media.
One of Corner’s features allows users to send Instagram and TikTok posts to the app, which extracts the restaurant information and adds it to the user’s map.
This month, Corner is overhauling its app with a new AI search feature that allows for semantic queries like “spots to cowork from” or “sexy wine bar.” Built on Anthropic’s Claude model (as well as a few others), the search pulls from Corner users’ posts and metadata available on the internet from sources like Google, social media, and reservations system Resy. The search results only provide places submitted by Corner users, however.
“Our AI on the backend is like a little agent that figures out what you’re looking for,” Xia said. “It looks at your entire history of places that you’ve ever saved, and then maps that to what might be the best recommendations for you,” based on your query.
Corner is also launching a digital magazine this month that will curate lists of reviews from the app. The startup has already expanded into events, with one down and a second planned in October.
While the startup isn’t monetizing the app yet, it’s considering a premium version of the app that would help users plan trips, Wu said. It’s also weighing the option of working with small businesses as a communications tool to potential customers.
However, they don’t want to go the Google Maps route and have sponsored places appear within the app.
With its latest product rollouts and a new AI engineering hire — the company now has eight employees — Corner is focused on growth.
Still, like any new social app landing on Gen Z’s phones, Corner will need to compete for their screen time.
“No matter what kind of feed we make, it’s just never going to be as interesting as Instagram or TikTok,” Wu said.
But as Xia puts it, the point of Corner “is not to get you socializing” on its app and instead get you to “make a plan to go somewhere with the actual people that you want to be social with.”
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