Bond uses AI memories to combat doomscrolling, but its data licensing plan raises questions

Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you kick your doomscrolling habit

Legacy social media sites have been designed to keep us hooked to our devices, eyes glued endlessly to retina-frying feeds of memes and dumb videos in order to create more engaged platforms for advertisements. In recent years, however, a swell of companies have sought to capitalize on users' burnout, pushing users to engage in IRL experiences, or offering products without addictive features like endless scroll. Bond, which officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those sites. Dino Becirovic, Bond's co-founder and CEO, says that his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans' screen addiction. The site works like this: Much like a normal social media platform, users post about what they've been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles, posting what it calls "memories," via a variety of mediums, including pictures, video, and audio files. Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator for what the user should go and do in the real world. Experiences stored within Bond become fodder for its AI system, which then gets trained on what kind of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic says. For instance, if you've been posting a lot about how much you like Pho and how you haven't had it in awhile, Bond's system might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that is getting good reviews. Or, if you're into heavy metal, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week. The more you post about your experiences, the more the system can feed you better recommendations, Becirovic says. In other words, the system is designed to get you off the app and back out into the real world, where you can do more stuff, instead of just "bed rotting" and "doomscrolling," as the kids these days say. The layout looks a little bit like Instagram, although there is no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a kind of cluster formation. Clicking on a profile brings up the user's current stories. These stories disappear from your public-facing profile after 24 hours, Becirovic said, but they then get stored in your private profile. Users can search through their own archive of memories whenever they want. Bond's team includes people who previously built major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, the company says. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond's founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, co-led integration of user signals at Google Gemini. What is the revenue path for a company like this? Most social media sites are just giant vehicles for advertising -- and that's where they make the lion's share of their revenue. Bond doesn't have ads, so how's it going to turn a buck? Interestingly enough, Becirovic envisions a scenario in which -- eventually -- users can license their own data from Bond's archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI-training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would take a very small cut of the profits via a licensing fee, thus generating ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider to AI companies that are looking to tune up their models. "The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories," he said. "If we become this platform with the right incentive structure to get billions of people to create about their daily lives, we will naturally become a really attractive place for people to want to train GPT six and seven, all the other variants that are going to come future." In another scenario, Bond would use its accumulated data to act as a product recommendation tool that integrates with e-commerce sites. "Our users would opt into this experience. If we are able to do this, we believe we could capture some value from the transaction with merchants by enabling a better user experience, driving conversion, and/or increasing throughput," Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email. Becirovic said that Bond would never sell users data for the purposes of advertising, and users can "delete any memories by either deleting them in the Memory tab or using natural language in Memory chat." He added: "Users can also delete their profile if they are not getting value from Bond. As the product grows, we will introduce more privacy control features to our users for them to manage their data." Becirovic said Bond will improve its encryption over time, though he is a little vague about the platform's current protections: "E2EE encryption is a priority for us in the near-future after launch. In the meantime, we store all user data securely in our database and ensure it is protected," he said. At the moment, Becirovic seems mostly focused on making Bond cool. "Monetization is not a short-term priority," he said. "Our initial focus is on creating an application users get more value from the more they capture their memories."

Bond launches post-feed social network using AI memories to fight doomscrolling, but its data model raises questions

In short: Bond, a new "post-feed" social network founded by former Index Ventures principal Dino Becirovic and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Arthur Brazinskas, launched on 21 April with no infinite scroll and no algorithmic feed, instead using AI trained on users' photos, videos, and audio to recommend real-world activities. The app enters a growing "healthier social media" category alongside Tangle (backed by Twitter and Pinterest co-founders), BeReal, and Locket, but its long-term business model of licensing user data for AI training and its launch without end-to-end encryption introduce tensions with its anti-exploitation positioning. Bond, a social media platform that launched on Tuesday, has no feed. There is no infinite scroll, no algorithmic timeline, no carousel of short videos calibrated to keep you watching the next one. Users post photos, video, and audio as "memories," and Bond's AI processes those memories to recommend real-world activities: a restaurant that serves the cuisine you have been posting about, a concert by a band whose music appears in your clips, a hiking trail near a location you photographed last weekend. The premise is that a social network should function as an idea generator for leaving your phone, not a reason to stay on it. Whether that premise can survive contact with the economics of consumer technology is the question the company has not yet answered. Bond was founded by Dino Becirovic, previously a principal at Index Ventures focused on consumer internet and marketplace investments, with earlier stints at Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs, and Twitter. The founding researcher is Arthur Brazinskas, who co-led integration of user signals at Google Gemini and worked on reinforcement learning from human feedback for model alignment, holding a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in opinion summarisation. The team includes people who previously built products at TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. The app is available on iOS and Android from launch. Funding details have not been disclosed. The interface presents user profiles in a cluster formation rather than a scrollable feed. Tapping a profile opens that person's current stories. There is no equivalent of Instagram's Explore page or TikTok's For You feed. The design is deliberately friction-heavy by the standards of conventional social media: it requires intentional navigation rather than passive consumption. The AI layer sits on top of this structure. Memories posted by users, their photos, videos, and audio, train the system on individual preferences, interests, and habits. Bond then generates personalised recommendations for experiences, events, and activities. Becirovic described the mechanism in concrete terms: if you have been posting about how much you like pho and how you have not had it in a while, Bond might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant getting good reviews. If you are into heavy metal, it might tell you Iron Maiden is playing in your city next week. Users can manage their data through a Memory tab or through natural language in what Bond calls "Memory chat," a conversational AI interface for reviewing, editing, or deleting stored content. Users can delete their entire profile if they choose. End-to-end encryption is not available at launch but Becirovic described it as "a priority for us in the near-future." In the meantime, Bond says it stores all user data securely in its database. Becirovic framed Bond as "an AI-powered solution to Americans' screen addiction," describing legacy social media platforms as "designed to keep us hooked to our devices, eyes glued endlessly to retina-frying feeds of memes and dumb videos in order to create more engaged platforms for advertisements." The platform is positioned explicitly against what he called "bed rotting" and "doomscrolling" culture. The timing is not accidental. A California jury found Meta and Google liable for intentionally building addictive social media platforms in a landmark trial last year, with 1,500 similar cases pending. A wave of European countries are banning children from social media entirely, with Australia, France, Spain, Austria, and Greece all moving to restrict access for minors and the EU Parliament backing a continent-wide digital minimum age of 16. EU regulators have already acted against features designed to reward excessive screen time, forcing TikTok to kill its Lite Rewards programme after Commissioner Thierry Breton stated that "the available brain time of young Europeans is not a currency for social media." The US Surgeon General has called for warning labels on social media platforms. The cultural and regulatory environment has never been more hostile to the engagement-maximisation model that funds the industry. The "healthier social media" category has been growing steadily. Tangle, founded by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, raised $29 million and asks users a single question each day: "What's your intention for today?" Sharp described the motivation as addressing "the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we've wrought the last 15 years." BeReal prompts users to post one unedited photo per day at a random time, discouraging the staging and filtering that define Instagram. Locket shares photos directly to friends' home screens via widgets, with no likes, follower counts, or public metrics. Noplace offers a minimalist, text-based social platform with chronological posts and no infinite scrolling. A growing wave of alternative platforms are rejecting the algorithmic status quo entirely, from Pixelfed to Cara, each built on the premise that the dominant model is broken. What distinguishes Bond from these alternatives is its use of AI as the core product rather than a feature layered on top. BeReal's innovation is a notification mechanism. Locket's is a widget. Bond's is a recommendation engine trained on personal content that learns what you enjoy and tells you where to find more of it in the physical world. The AI is not generating content for you to consume. It is processing content you have already created to push you toward experiences you might not have found otherwise. Bond's long-term business model introduces a tension that the launch rhetoric does not resolve. Becirovic has said the company will never sell user data for advertising purposes. But he has described a future in which users can license their own data from Bond's archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI training, with Bond taking a cut through a licensing fee. The company also envisions using accumulated data as a product recommendation tool integrated with e-commerce sites. This means the same personal memories that Bond frames as private and user-controlled are also, in the company's own long-term vision, a monetisable asset. The distinction between "selling data for advertising" and "licensing data for AI training" is semantic rather than structural. In both cases, intimate personal content, the photos and videos and audio that users post because they trust a platform that promises not to exploit them, becomes the product. The cognitive harms of doomscrolling are well documented: impaired attention, degraded memory, lowered mood. Bond is correct that the problem is real. Whether an AI system that processes your most personal content and plans to monetise it through data licensing is the solution, rather than a different version of the same exchange, is the question the company will eventually have to answer more precisely than it has so far. The absence of end-to-end encryption at launch makes this sharper. Bond is asking users to upload photos, videos, and audio of their personal lives to a platform that processes that content with AI, stores it without end-to-end encryption, and has a stated long-term plan to create a data licensing marketplace around it. The privacy architecture does not yet match the privacy promise. For a platform built on the premise that social media betrayed its users' trust, that gap matters more than it would for a conventional app, because Bond is explicitly asking people to trust it with the kind of content they stopped trusting Instagram with. Bond has the right diagnosis. Social media is too addictive, too passive, too disconnected from the physical world it was supposed to enhance. The prescription, an AI that knows you well enough to tell you what to do next, is either a genuinely better model or the same surveillance architecture wearing a wellness brand. The answer depends entirely on execution, and the company has not yet been tested by the pressures, growth targets, investor expectations, competitive dynamics, that turned every previous social platform's founding principles into a footnote in its terms of service.