A Student Start-up Fights Loneliness on Campus
Prianna Sharan was Innovate@BU’s 2025 Student Innovator of the Year. Now she’s taking her Popple app beyond Boston.
Early in her sophomore year at BU, Prianna Sharan was confronted with a harsh truth: the friends you make your first semester at college don’t always stay with you through graduation. “I had this classic experience where my friend group wound up breaking up,” she says. “So in my second year of college, I really did need to find my people.”
In the years following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new public health threat emerged: loneliness. This epidemic is believed to be most severe among young people— especially college students. A 2023 report by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that less than 40 percent of American adults reported feeling very close to others, with young adults reporting the lowest rates of social connection.
Sharan (CAS’25) did retain a few friends from her first year, among them Remi Chester (Questrom’25). As two small fish in a sea of nearly 38,000, they were aware of the statistics on young adult loneliness. “We had a conversation where we said we both feel like we haven’t found our people, and we were sure other students felt that way,” Sharan says.
Inspiration came as the two scrolled through their Instagram accounts and noticed that their peers were attending tons of on and off-campus events and posting about their experiences. “We never really felt comfortable going, because we didn’t know anybody,” Sharan says. “We weren’t in any clubs and we didn’t have an on-campus community. It can be hard to find that, especially in this digital age.”
A room of strangers was a daunting proposition for the two of them—but what if it didn’t have to be? What if they had a pre-fabbed group of friends to go to concerts, rock-climbing gyms, and museums with? What if this group was selected based on shared interests, so that there was always something to talk about? What if they were all BU students, and all the events on offer were local? Their idea materialized as Popple, a social media app designed to get its users active and connected in the real world, designed by Sharan, a computer science major, and marketed by Chester.
“I built the app and do all of the tech stuff, and Remi does all of the marketing, including creating the graphics and putting up Popple flyers. Together, we do business strategy and finances,” Sharan says. The undergraduates took Popple from concept to reality, netting awards, speaking engagements, seed funding, and more than 5,000 app users. Now, as graduates, they’re overseeing a team of 10 fellow BU alums—and they’re looking to expand beyond Boston.
“We didn’t know anybody. We weren’t in any clubs and we didn’t have an on-campus community. It can be hard to find that, especially in this digital age.
The Road to Innovation
Popple was a whole new world for both students, but Sharan and Chester soon found that, between the former’s computer science education and the latter’s business and marketing acumen, they had what it took to develop and launch a product. The concept was simple,and originally tailored to BU: users made connections with other Terriers on the app, then made plans to meet up at events in and around campus.
New Popple users, whether students or young professionals, are greeted by a survey that asks demographic questions and probes user interests. The results populate an “interest matrix” to be compared, using an AI-powered algorithm, with other users from the same institution. The survey results will also influence what goes into a generated list of local events offered by app partners; users who indicate “music” and “nightlife” as their interests will see more events at bars and concert venues.
“Once you see an event you like, you’re able to click on it, read a little bit about it, and join a group,” Sharan says. “The idea is that if you don’t have anybody to go to an event with, there’s a ton of people in your shoes.” Group members can chat, swap info, and make plans on where to meet.
In 2023, Popple’s first year of development, the app netted a $15,000, second-place prize in the BU School of Hospitality Administration’s Poyiadjis Hospitality Innovation Competition. Later that year, it earned a spot in MassChallenge, an international start-up accelerator with a notoriously slim acceptance rate. “We were the youngest people in that program,” Sharan says. “We met a ton of great mentors, and we also started guerilla marketing very aggressively.”
In her junior year, Sharan began working closely with staff at Innovate@BU’s Innovation Pathway program to go over data, accumulate feedback, and run beta tests. Focus-testing was going well, with early surveys showing that more than 80 percent of respondents were interested in downloading the app. Popple launched publicly to an international audience in 2024, along with 900 other start-ups vying for the Hult Prize, a social impact competition sometimes referred to as “the Nobel Prize for students.”
In spring 2025, Sharan—by then Popple’s official chief technology officer—was named Innovate@BU’s Student Innovator of the Year. “I was at [the BUild Lab] pretty much every single day of the past four years, so it felt like an award for the whole community,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here without the support from Innovate@BU.”
Beyond BU
The next step for Popple was to find its own network of collaborators. BU was the first of the platform’s institutional partners, and many of Boston’s schools are now onboard as brand ambassadors, each with its own version of the Popple platform. Sharan and Chester have also expanded beyond universities: Fidelity Investments commissioned a bespoke version of the Popple platform for members of its start-up and venture capital brokerage, while Fenway Park has partnered for a networking event.
It’s clear to Sharan that Popple is capable of growth. In 2026, she and Chester plan to introduce event ticket sales directly on the app, where Popple shares a percentage of the profits with event partners, and they project reaching $37.5 million in revenue and 11.6 million platform users within three years. Meanwhile, investment offers have been coming in, and the partners are looking to expand into the New York market. It’s an exciting time for Popple— exhilarating, even.
“Our goal is to take another year of focusing on college students, and then, hopefully, as people on a platform become graduates, we’ll grow with that and open up to the post-grad market,” Sharan says. “Because if you’re moving to a new city, and you’re wondering who’s out there, Popple is the solution.”