German founder raises $15M from Benchmark to build a 'world's mutual friend' social platform that bridges filter bubbles

Paul Scherer grew up in a village of fewer than a thousand people in Germany, dropped out of high school at 17, and spent three months sending 25,000 tweets during the pandemic before he knew what a VC was. He moved to San Francisco on a one-way flight less than a year ago, stayed in a hostel, and has since raised $15 million from Benchmark for Eigen, a social platform he describes as the "world's mutual friend."

The pitch is that hyper-personalization has made everyone's information environment divergent and, by extension, isolating. The average person today maintains roughly 600 relationships, up from perhaps 100 a century ago, but the number of genuinely close ones has collapsed. Eigen wants to close that gap by strengthening existing relationships rather than adding new ones, positioning itself somewhere between the algorithmic filter bubble and the raw average of the internet.

The product is pre-launch. Scherer says early users are already creating what he calls "moments of magic," but nothing has shipped publicly. Benchmark's involvement came through Matt and Zio (likely partners at the firm), with Ben Silberman also named as an investor. Scherer describes the relationship as convergent rather than pitched — they agreed on what the future should look like and committed within roughly three days.

“Instead of all of these things that are out there trying to optimize our own bubbles, we wanna bring these bubbles a bit closer together again. I don't wanna make another square. We have enough squares competing for our attention, and maybe the next thing isn't another square, but something completely different.”

Platform model

Scherer is openly skeptical that the product will be a conventional app at all. He references Silberman's story about his son describing Pinterest as "one of the squares on your phone" and says he doesn't want to build another square. The company's current web presence is its physical office rendered as a website, with no email capture and no waitlist — just an address and a hiring page at teamiagen.com.

On the question of whether this becomes a dating app, Scherer is direct: the focus on deepening existing relationships rather than discovering new ones structurally limits that drift, though he acknowledges the risk exists historically with any proximity-based social product.

Consumer AI timing

Scherer argues the consumer AI boom hasn't actually arrived yet. Single-player AI experiences, he says, are orders of magnitude more powerful than they were, but the genuinely durable social products built on new AI primitives haven't been invented — and that takes time. It's a reasonable framing of why the App Store charts are still dominated by chatbots, though it also conveniently leaves room for Eigen to be the product that eventually fills that gap.

Benchmark has backed early-stage consumer social before, but a $15 million bet on a pre-launch product with no disclosed traction is a notable level of conviction — or patience.