‘I can not explain. It’s weird,” Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell said. After losing his job at Twitter when Elon Musk took over, the former global head of Social & Editorial didn’t want to rest – he wanted to build. “I came right out and was like, ‘Oh, it’s time. It’s time to build, whether we get support or not.'”
Lucky for Terrell, his new social media app To spill has already raised a seed round of $2.75 million, the company announced today. Since unveiling the project in mid-December, Spill has reached 60,000 reservations.
Spill currently employs fewer than 10 people and has three strategic advisors, including former Twitter design chief Dantley Davis, #OscarsSoWhite creator and DEI advocate April Reign, and civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson. CTO is DeVaris Brown, a former Twitter product manager who left in 2020 to found Meroxa, a Series A startup that makes it easier for companies to build their data pipelines.
Terrell has more than a decade of executive-level experience in marketing and social content, campaigning for companies like HBO and Showtime before Twitter. If there’s a tech founder who can keep a finger on the pulse of what social media users actually want, it’s Terrell, especially with an all-star team of advisors and peers in his corner.
Like Twitter, Spill will have a live news feed where users can post “spills”, a reference to the phrase “spill the tea.” Spill is also building a feature called ‘tea parties’ where users can host both online and IRL events and then get in-app bonuses to apply to things like boosting their posts – these bonuses will also be for sale .
“We’re really leaning into meme culture, making it easier to put text on top of images or gifs — little touches and tweaks like that were really exciting,” Terrell said.
Terrell and Brown, the founders of black social media, have observed how black cultural contributions are scammed or overshadowed, while white creators get credit for creating dances or memes they had nothing to do with. Spill plans to integrate blockchain technology to credit and pay creators who start trends and broad conversations, though Terrell is adamant that Spill is not a crypto project and will not pay in crypto. Rather, it is just another technological tool that will exist under the hood.
On traditional social media platforms, black people have formed their own communities, such as Black Twitter. Spill hopes to be a home for black users from the start, as the people building the app are part of that community. Terrell consulted black creators about what they’re looking for on Spill, while Brown is building an AI moderation model that incorporates black dialects into its DNA. Historically, studies have shown that tweets written in AAVE (African American vernacular English) were 2.2 times more likely to be wrongly marked as offensive. That’s because most AI can’t understand the cultural context in which certain speech is used, especially if the people behind the algorithm don’t understand that either.
“We are going to be more mindful and precise on things that are considered abusive, because again, this is our lived experience or learned experience,” Brown told businessroundups.org in December. “It will be much more accurate to catch those kinds of things that detract from the platform and don’t help create a safe space for our users and our creators.”
With its $2.75 million in pre-seed funding, the app will begin to grow its team. four rolls in engineering and community management.
Leading the investment are MaC Venture Capital and Kapor Center, with participation from Sunset Ventures. As reported by businessroundups.org, black founders continue to be disproportionately overlooked in venture capital, raising just 1% of funds by 2022.
“We knew we were running into a lot,” Terrell said. But when Terrell Spill to the Kapor centera fund specifically working to close access gaps for several founders, the investors decided to contribute within ten minutes of their pitch.
“We are excited that Spill is looking to address the major challenges of existing social media platforms and use technology to build more diverse, equitable and inclusive online communities,” said Allison Scott, CEO of the Kapor Center, in an e-mailed statement. mail.
Spill plans to launch in alpha in the first quarter of this year. Users can reserve their handles on Spill’s website.
