Spoony, an award-winning Australian social media app focused on the disabled and neurodivergent community, will shut down as investors turn their focus from ‘traditional’ tech startups to artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2024 as an alternative to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and X, Spoony is a social media app helping users bond over their shared experiences.
The startup raised $1 million to fuel its early expansion, and now counts more than 65,000 users across the disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill communities.
But co-founder and CEO Nicholas Carlton says Spoony is set to close by the end of May after its planned October 2025 funding round fell through.
Speaking to SmartCompany, Carlton said Spoony followed the ‘grow first, monetise’ later model, which has fallen out of favour with investors now prioritising profitability.
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“In the two years that I’ve been working on Spoony, the environment has really changed a lot,” he said.
“The sands have shifted, in a way, and I think there’s an expectation now from investors that you are monetising much, much earlier.”
Advertising — the lifeblood of traditional social media — only makes sense once platforms pass a million users, said Carlton.
“I’m disappointed that we haven’t had the opportunity to grow into that,” he said.
Spoony explored other avenues. It referred users to speech pathologists, or doctors capable of administering ADHD and autism assessments, in a model Carlton called “really successful”.
However, pursuing those opportunities further would have turned Spoony into a fully-fledged digital health business.
“We very much wanted to stay as a lightweight technology company that was bringing people together,” he said.
Turning down AI in market frenzy
Another turning point came when Spoony experimented with a digital therapist powered by artificial intelligence.
That model proved popular among some Spoony users, even as it pulled the startup further from its core ethos.
“I got really concerned about the relationships people were forming with humanised AI, and so it felt, in the end, quite antithetical to what Spoony was, which was connecting two people together,” said Carlton.
Eschewing artificial intelligence — not just in the chatbot, but when constructing the Spoony app itself — proved challenging for the startup when it sought further investment.
“A lot of investors probably would have preferred that we were hooking people up with AI friends,” he said.
“You can see that a lot of the funding has gone towards AI companions and AI friends. That’s sort of very much where the VC focus is right now.”
And Spoony’s heterodox approach to AI showed when it won a Good Design Award last year, leading Carlton to celebrate “fiercely human” design in the “era of AI slop”.
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The startup is now pursuing the sale of its assets to an acquirer, potentially an existing digital health business, that seeks a community element.
Without that kind of sale, the Spoony platform will wind down by the end of May.
Reflecting on the startup’s trajectory, Carlton said he hoped investors will back future innovation in the disability sector.
“That part saddens me, that we just weren’t able to get there.”
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