FirstMove is a small team building the Presence Layer for live events and every room in between. A consent-first social layer that wakes up where people gather, then disappears when they leave.
Consent-first
By architecture
Ephemeral
By default
Hyperlocal
Never global
Built for IRL
Off the phone
Every festival. Every conference. Every Tuesday at the gym. Every Friday in the corner of a bar. Rooms full of people who would have clicked, if only they had known the other was there.
Dating apps reduced that to a swipe. Feeds reduced it to a scroll. Both made the loneliness worse.
FirstMove is the alternative. A geofenced VibeZone wakes up when you arrive and shuts down when you leave. A three-step handshake (Knock, Challenge, Connect) keeps every first move mutual. Privacy is the architecture, not a setting at the bottom of a menu.
We are not a dating app. Not a ticketing platform. Not another social feed. We are the Presence Layer for the rooms you are already in.
Real connection needs real trust. We collect the minimum, share nothing without consent, and forget you the moment you leave the geofence.
We design for the moment in front of you, not the metric on our dashboard. The app's job is to get out of the way so people can actually meet.
Attendees, organisers, venues, regulators. We tell each side the same story, and we stay accountable when we fall short.
A few months in, we sat down and wrote what we actually believe. About why dating apps reduced people to swipe fodder. About why feeds made loneliness worse. About why the next category of consumer social is not a better profile, but a better room.
The Presence Layer is the result. A long-form argument for a new class of social infrastructure: software that wakes up when people gather, introduces the strangers who want to be introduced, and disappears the moment they leave. It is the document behind every decision we make.
The room is a database with no query layer. It contains every connection the operator paid to host. None of them can find each other.
From Chapter I · The room
Co-founder & CEO
Cybersecurity background. Sets product direction and the consent-first architecture behind the 3-Way Handshake.
Team
Praise Gabriel
Analytics
Tijani Mudathir
Front End
Tareeq Mpagi
UI/UX
We're hiring across engineering, design, and operations. See open roles.
We like talking to organisers, venues, partners, and anyone who reckons they should be on the team.
