On TikTok, Daze's most popular video has garnered 8 million views. Between TikTok and Instagram, the startup that is behind the new messaging app targeting Gen Z has seen around 48 million combined views. The waitlist for sign-ups is already bursting, with some 156,000 sign-ups prelimaunch.

It's not any soft-speak influencer or a paid advertisement that is driving the demand for this next-gen alternative to iMessage and WhatsApp, but just product demo videos of the app in action, which have impressed a younger audience.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Willem Simons out of New York, Daze is a freestyle messaging app that gets cues from social media. Much like making an Instagram story with different fonts and style, graphics and all, the bubble-talking old blue and green messaging days are long gone. Instead, multi-colored messages float across your screen accompanied by pics, graphics, stickers, GIFs, drawings, decorated backgrounds, and lots more.

In addition to these, the app is currently leveraging AI to add some smarts in its creative tools. It plans to dig deeper and integrate more AI-based technologies in the future.

Our goal with Daze has been to make a feature-complete messenger that's competitive with iMessage, WhatsApp, etc, but still has a suite of really fun and creative features," Simons told TechCrunch. "You can quickly type out a message and send it, or drag the message anywhere within the chat. It is easy to use and utilitarian, but also very free and unconstrained.".

It's not the first time Simons has rolled with this concept. For several years ending in 2022 he was working on an app with a similar feel called Muze. As with Daze, Muze reimagines mobile messaging as a free-form canvas for creativity, with much the same set of tools. But whereas Muze was co-founded by Simons and Douglas Witte and Grant Davis, with Fenner Stevens as CEO, Daze is his own baby.

The new application, pivoting on the social calendar beginnings of Daze, has been built fully in React Native, ensuring that its simultaneous launch is possible on iOS and Android. Its launch date is scheduled to be November 4. So far, the app had been in early testing with about 1,400 invite-only beta users.

Although beta metrics are still yet to be proven in real-world use cases, one encouraging figure shared by a source familiar with the company's tests is that Daze has more than a 50% 60-day retention for its users who have gone on to send a message on the app.

The company of seven full-time staff and one part-time is based mostly in New York with a few working remotely.

Before the launch, Daze had raised $5.7 million in funding from a16z, Kindred Ventures, Alpaca Ventures, Uncommon Projects, Betaworks, Maveron, 35 Ventures, New Wave, Antoine Martin, among others.