PARTI GIRLS

How Palantir alums Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao created Partiful, Gen-Z's buzziest, most chaotic invite platform.

- By JOHN JANNUZZI

INVITES ONLY Founders Joy Tao and Shreya Murthy wanted to create a "company where younger versions of ourselves could really thrive."

The last thing anybody associates with the somewhat mysterious and absolutely serious Palantir is a party. And yet Partiful, today's most buzzed-about invite platform, with five million users, was hatched by two former Palantir staffers.

If you've not had firsthand experience with Partiful, it's only a matter of time. It's become the platform of choice for event planning, offering a free and more upbeat energy than its competitors. It is especially popular among the notoriously hard-to-please Gen-Z market.

The five-year-old startup is the brainchild of Shreya Murthy, 35, and Joy Tao, 37. They both worked at Palantir, the Peter Thiel-backed software company that creates AI tools to analyze complicated data from a wide array of sources. (The exact opposite of a party.) But their paths never crossed: Murthy led business operations and strategy and Tao was a product engineer, steeped in the technical side.

Murthy is candid about their time at Palantir and elsewhere. “I think we were both growing disillusioned with the places we had worked and the missions those companies were serving.” She asked herself: “What do I want to pour my heart and soul into? What's something I can work on and actually feel good about?”

Enter Partiful. Its mission, says Murthy, is rooted in the problem of “loneliness, social isolation, and how social media—which had this grand promise of bringing us closer together—was actually dividing us more than ever.” Simply put, she wanted to make it easier to bring people together.