Krishna Dosapati, the 32 year old founder and chief executive of networking app Clockout, has raised 3.5 million dollars to tackle a problem she says traditional professional networking platforms have made worse rather than better: young people struggling to form real connections outside of a screen.
The funding round was led by 114 Ventures, with additional backing from Evite Ventures, Allied Ventures, Sher Ventures, Gaingels, BMPB VC, and other investors. Clockout positions itself somewhere between LinkedIn and Meetup, letting users browse professionals nearby based on their work, interests, and mutual connections, with the explicit goal of pushing people toward meeting offline rather than simply collecting another digital contact.
A Problem Dosapati Experienced Firsthand
Dosapati has said professional networking has grown too dependent on digital platforms even as meeting people face to face has become genuinely harder, particularly for anyone who has recently moved to a new city or switched into a new industry. She encountered that gap directly after graduating from New York University and starting her career in New York, where building a real social and professional circle proved more difficult than she expected despite the city's density of young professionals.
