Spill, the social media app that prides itself in providing a safe environment for Black people and the LGBTQ community, is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a $2 million extension from Collide Capital, an investment group that supports rising businesses.
Spill’s co-founder Alphonzo Terrell said the latest extension is much needed for the platform as it continues to face increasing expenses while growing in popularity.
“We put an invite-only beta in June, and within three weeks, it went viral,” Terrell told TechCrunch. “Suddenly, we’re supporting a city, we have data costs, we have infrastructure, we have to accelerate our building times, so we really needed an extension to do that effectively.”
The app has already raised $5 million, according to TechCrunch, and gained about 200,000 users. Terrell launched the app a year ago shortly after being laid off from Twitter. The tech expert attended Blavity Inc.’s AFROTECH Conference after being let go from Twitter and connected with professionals who would help him launch his business. Terrell also called his former colleague at Twitter, DeVaris Brown, and asked him to come along.
“I called him and I said, ‘I think it’s time to build and if we do this together, I think this can be really successful,'” Terrell said he told Brown, CNN reported.
The duo then vowed to work together and decided to name the app Spill, a reference to the phrase “spill the tea.” Shortly after the public heard about the app, over 25,000 people joined the waiting list to get on Spill, Terrell said. A year later, the founder is proud of the impact he has already seen from the app.
“To be able to make something for the community, it’s just really beautiful,” he told TechCrunch.
Terrell returned to AfroTech over the weekend to interview Mitch and Freida Kapor, founders of the Oakland-based venture capital firm Kapor Capital. The Spill co-founder also introduced Tea Party, a live-streaming feature. Kerry Washington had the honor of being the first Tea Party host.
“Tea Parties reflect the communities that we have always spoken very clearly that we are here to center,” Kenya Parham, Spill’s Global VP of Community and Partnerships, told TechCrunch. “Black communities, queer communities, women, non-binary and femme stories are all the way at the forefront, and the community is just eating it up.”
Having worked at Twitter, Terrell said he learned from the deficiencies of that app.
“I was very familiar with where the challenges of that platform were,” he told CNN. “Our core thesis with Spill was to focus on the culture drivers — Black women, the queer community, other culture-driving communities around the world that are often setting the tone, the trends, the lexicon, all the amazing magic that will happen on social platforms, but getting the lion’s share of hate, abuse [and] not getting credited or rewarded the way they should for their contributions.”
The goal, according to the leaders at Spill, is to make sure the app is as unique as possible.
“The distinction here is that Spill is not trying to be Black Twitter 2.0,” April Reign, an advisor to Spill, told CNN. “I think that Black Twitter thrived … sometimes in spite of the platform itself. Spill is intentionally creating a foundation.”
Spill’s leaders are especially focused on making sure creators, particularly Black social media users who are overlooked on other platforms, get rewarded for their content.
“We have had about 20 years of social media to learn from, and we wanted to take lessons from that and apply them going forward to really unleash the next generation of social, which we think can be far more beneficial, entertaining, rewarding,” Terrell said.
