Draft:Zenly

Overview
Zenly (owned by Snap Inc.) is a French location-sharing and mapping application, originally founded in Paris, France. The platform offers a mix of social and utility functions, leveraging location and sensor data from the smartphones of its users. Customers get the view of real-time location of their friends, who they can add to their social network, as well as their smartphone metrics, such as battery percentage and phone's movement speed.... .

Zenly offers in-app chatting, emoji exchange and animation-sharing with the friend group, indicating that the meet-up between two users occured in real life. Apart from that, the app offer special features like "Ghost Mode", which enables users to hide their current location by either "freezing" it or making it "blurry".

As of September 2022, Zenly was ranked 10th in the list of most-downloaded social apps, leading in France, Spain, Poland, and Denmark.

History
The company was founded in 2011 by Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo. The application named "Zenly" was launched in 2015 in Paris. The company had 2 rounds of later stage Venture Capital funding in March and May 2016, raising $11.2M and $22.5M accordingly. The latest round was led by Benchmark's general partner Peter Fenton, who became a member of company's board

In 2017 the company was acquired by Snap Inc. for $213M, after rolling out its location-sharing Snap Map feature. After introducing new app design same year Zenly reached 35 million monthly active users. To confront the breakout of COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, Zenly introduced a gamified quarantine challenge, creating a leaderboard based on the percentage of time spent at home to encourage self-isolation. Additional features included Coronavirus-prevention tips, World Health Organization infopage link, and global statistics on confirmed disease cases and recoveries

In 2022 Zenly's co-founder Antoine Martin left the company, and Snap's CEO Evan Spiegel took over his role together with other parts od Snap, such as Snapchat ans Spectacles. Same year, the company launched a redesign of the application, focusing on its mapping feature and starting to compete with other web mapping platforms, such as Google Maps and Apple Maps. The focus of the redesign was on personalized mapping feature, customized to users' priorities. The company leveraged OpenStreetMap as an open data source to build its global map inside Zenly, classifying various areas based on their ingrained features

On August 31st, 2022, Snap made an announcement of closing down Zenly in February 2023 and laying off 20% of its workforce