80. Peanut

Founders: Michelle Kennedy and Greg Orlowski
Founded: October 2016 (launched February 2017)
Website: www.peanut-app.io/

Michelle Kennedy knows a thing or two about what makes for a successful app.

The serial entrepreneur, and mum to four-year-old ‘peanut’ Finlay, has been involved in the creation and growth of two of the country’s most popular dating apps. She helped to launch millennial dating app Bumble and previously served as deputy CEO of $100m+ Badoo.

Created with Deliveroo co-founder Greg Orlowski, her latest start-up venture – London-based Peanut – draws on her technical background and business experience.

Having spent five years connecting people for romantic relationships, CEO Kennedy has built Peanut to address a different area of relationships; targeting the issue of maternal loneliness and isolation to help mothers connect with one another so as to ‘meet as mamas, connect as women’.

Using algorithms more commonly associated with dating (such as the act of ‘swiping right’) to offer a great user experience, the app enables mothers to build relationships with one another while simultaneously bringing together valuable information and content relating to motherhood.

The free-to-use app is able to show its users content that is trending among its community while also highlighting content that’s most relevant to who the user is as a mother.

With a team of seven and seed investment from notable investors including Sweet Capital Investment; the fund from Candy Crush inventors King.com, and Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm Sound Ventures, Peanut has already seen over 300,000 mums sign up across the UK and US with over 17 million swipes.

While Kennedy asserts that starting and scaling Peanut has not been without its challenges (the app has received criticism for only being open to mothers and not fathers too) her primary focus for the business is to “create a platform for mothers which is long overdue, and much deserved”.

The ultimate goal? “To have Peanut become synonymous with modern motherhood and to challenge, and change, perceptions around motherhood.”