Think back to high school. Besides the bad cafeteria food and cringe-worthy fashion choices, you might remember getting your class schedule at the beginning of the year, and the grueling process of nailing down what friends were in which class and who you had lunch with. Between that and extracurricular activities, you probably had a pretty crammed schedule, and few options for organizing your social life besides group chats or (if you’re ancient) phone calls.
Of course, now there’s an app for that. And its name is Saturn.
By layering social features like group chats and DMing capabilities with scheduling and calendars, Saturn does away with the disparate paper planners and bulletin boards of yesteryear. In some ways, the app serves as a personal planner, allowing users to block out their daily schedule and easily manage things like tests and homework. In other ways, it’s another social media platform, a means of chatting with friends throughout the day.
To date, Saturn says it has seen “explosive growth” across hundreds of U.S. high schools, and is preparing for a national expansion just in time for the school year to start this fall. The company has also built out a large network of Gen Z ambassadors who continuously provide feedback and show the app to their friends and peers.
“Their insights and feedback are at the heart of the decisions we make and every feature we ship,” co-founder Max Baron said in a statement. “Having seen considerable growth in engagement and retention last year, we are excited to welcome thousands of new communities to Saturn in the near future.”
Saturn is one of many apps that have been designed with Gen Z in mind lately. Step, a teen-focused online banking app, recently got $100 million in fresh funding and an endorsement from TikTok star Charli D’Amelio. And Realworld, a platform that helps recent college grads and other young adults travers the ins and outs of adulthood, was just featured among Built In NYC’s “The Future 5” round-up of up-and-coming tech startups.
Part of what makes Saturn different, however, is that it was created by Gen Z founders. Barron’s co-founder Dylan Diamond made the first iteration of the app in 2015 when he was a junior in high school, and the two of them met as sophomores at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.
At the time, both of them were pretty successful on their own, as recently reported by Forbes. Diamond had developed Tesla Toolbox, an app that lets Tesla drivers control their cars from their Apple watches, and was working as Tesla’s youngest full-time employee. Barron was running a social media consultancy with buy-in from the likes of Dr. Dre and Snapchat. When Diamond won a Thiel Fellowship in 2020, he and Barron dropped out of college and decided to work together on Saturn full-time.
Now, the company has raised $44 million in funding from VC heavyweights General Catalyst, Insight Partners and Coatue. A bevy of other big names across Big Tech and Hollywood, including Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Robert Downey Jr. and Ashton Kutcher, are also listed as investors.
“It’s clear from the retention and engagement on Saturn that this product is resonating with the demo, and it starts with the team,” Jerry Murdock, a co-founder and Insight Partners who has also personally invested in Saturn, said in a statement. “With Gen Z founders, it is no surprise they are better at understanding and empathizing with the needs of today’s high school students, and that has us very excited about new features and expansion in the immediate future.”
To keep the ball rolling, Saturn says it plans to use this money to grow its NYC-based team, particularly in product and engineering roles. The company is hiring, with a dozen open tech positions available now.
