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Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao

Courtesy: Partiful

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”

The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.

Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.

The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.

Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.

Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.

Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.

What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.

“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.

For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.

It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.

Sample invitations from the Partiful app

Source: Partiful

Bringing people together in real life

Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech. 

Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”

“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”

Meta declined to comment.

Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.

“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.

She and Tao took the leap.

With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users. 

Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaking Gen Z’s language

What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.

Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.

Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.

Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.

“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”

For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.

As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.

Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Partiful is free, at least for now.

Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.

That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.

For now, Partiful remains confident.

“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.

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Amazon’s new Echo devices designed for Alexa+ start at $99

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Amazon's new Echo devices designed for Alexa+ start at

Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, announces the Echo Studio and Echo Dot Max during an Amazon event showcasing new products in New York City, U.S., September 30, 2025.

Kylie Cooper | Reuters

Amazon on Tuesday unveiled four new smart speakers and voice-activated displays that are revamped with Alexa+, its personal assistant that’s powered by generative artificial intelligence.

The company debuted the Echo Dot Max, a revamped version of its compact smart speaker, which costs $99.99. Amazon also unveiled a new Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11, priced at $179.99 and $219.99, respectively.

There’s also a new version of the Echo Studio, a larger, higher-end model with a more powerful speaker, priced at $219.99.

All the devices are available for preorder on Tuesday, and users will get Alexa+ early access “out of the box,” Amazon said. The Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio ship Oct. 29, while the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 ship Nov. 12.

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The devices were launched at Amazon’s fall hardware bonanza, held in New York. They’re the first batch of revamped products under the leadership of Panos Panay, a former Microsoft hardware leader who joined Amazon in 2023.

It’s also the first set of Amazon hardware to integrate the company’s long-awaited Alexa+, which debuted in February and has slowly rolled out in early access for some users.

“These are the most powerful Echo devices we have ever created,” Panay said on stage at the event. “Custom silicon, advanced sensors, our best microphones and sound, noise cancellation, understanding the user, faster than anything we’ve ever delivered before. They’re also beautifully designed to fade into the background.”

Alongside a revamped look, Amazon added new AZ3 and AZ3 Pro chips for edge processing to the devices, which are faster, more powerful and have “AI built right in,” said Daniel Rausch, the head of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo businesses.

Panos Panay, head of Amazon’s Devices and Services team, introduces Echo during an Amazon product event in the Manhattan borough of New York City on September 30, 2025. Amazon announced its next generation of Kindle, Ring, Blink, Fire TV, and Echo devices.

Charly Triballeau | Afp | Getty Images

The devices also feature a so-called Omnisense platform that gives Alexa “better contextual awareness,” Rausch said. It allows the Echo Show to be able to recognize users and serve up personalized insights, like an analysis of how they slept last night or alert users if they left their front door unlocked after midnight.

Amazon faces growing pressure to update its hardware and software for the generative AI age following the success of rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Meta also has its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which use its Llama large language model to answer spoken questions from the user.

Amazon is also looking beyond Alexa or Echo smart speakers for opportunities in device growth.

The company in July confirmed it’s acquiring AI wearables startup Bee, which makes a wristband that can record and transcribe conversations.

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Nvidia’s market cap tops $4.5 trillion after string of AI infrastructure deals

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Nvidia's market cap tops .5 trillion after string of AI infrastructure deals

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

Nvidia shares reached a fresh record on Tuesday, climbing almost 3% and lifting the chipmaker’s market cap past $4.5 trillion.

The stock is now up about 39% for the year, and continues to attract investors as Nvidia steps up its pace of deal-making, cementing its position at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

OpenAI said last week that Nvidia would take an equity stake worth up to $100 billion in the AI startup, and would build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers filled with Nvidia graphics processing units. OpenAI then announced five massive new data centers with Oracle that are expected to be filled with hundreds of thousands of GPUs. The whole “Stargate” project will cost $500 billion, the companies said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s products comprise about 70% of the spending on a new AI data center.

Analysts at Citi on Tuesday raised their price target on Nvidia from $200 to $210, citing an increased forecast for AI infrastructure spending after the OpenAI announcements.

“We believe OpenAI came to Nvidia asking for help as Nvidia has a very compelling product, and as the number of users and compute being consumed per user basis is growing,” Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote in the note.

OpenAI is far from alone, as Meta, Google and others are also dramatically ramping up their infrastructure spending.

CoreWeave, a cloud provider that includes Nvidia as a large shareholder, said Tuesday it had reached a deal to supply Meta with $14.2 billion in AI infrastructure services.

Nvidia’s stock is outperforming all of its megacap peers so far this year except for chipmaker Broadcom, which is up about 40%, similarly boosted by OpenAI.

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Spotify founder Daniel Ek stepping down as CEO, company names co-CEOs to replace him

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Spotify founder Daniel Ek stepping down as CEO, company names co-CEOs to replace him

Daniel Ek, founder and chief executive officer of Spotify, attends the Cannes Lions 2016 on June 22, 2016 in Cannes, France. 

Antoine Antoniol | Getty Images

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will step down from his position and move to the role of executive chairman, the company said Tuesday.

Spotify shares dipped around 4% following the announcement.

Ek, who co-founded the streaming platform in 2006, will be replaced by current co-presidents and longtime executives Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström as co-CEOs, the company said in a release. The transition will happen Jan. 1, 2026.

“Over the last few years, I’ve turned over a large part of the day-to-day management and strategic direction of Spotify to Alex and Gustav–who have shaped the company from our earliest days and are now more than ready to guide our next phase,” Ek said in a release. “This change simply matches titles to how we already operate.”

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Ek, who has been a member of the board since 2008, said his new role will focus on steering the company’s long-term strategy and providing support to its senior team.

“It’s been an honor of a lifetime for me to be able to lead Spotify for close to 20 years,” Ek said in an X post.

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Spotify year-to-date stock chart.

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