Band Creator’s New App truloop Raises $580K from CRIT Ventures

But Beautiful, the company behind the AI-native social app truloop, has raised approximately KRW 800 million ($580,000) from CRIT Ventures.

The startup brings a pedigreed founding team. Founder and CEO Park Soo-man created Me2day, Korea’s first microblog, which he sold to Naver, and later served as head of operations for Band, Naver’s group messaging app that reached 19.2 million monthly active users. Park subsequently built Beat, a social music app that surpassed 8 million downloads, and served as CEO of Naver’s Tune CIC, overseeing services including Clova, Vibe, and Naver Now. He established But Beautiful in Los Angeles in 2025.

Joining him is CBO Kim Hyung-il, former U.S. head of Webtoon Entertainment (Naver Webtoon). A member of Naver’s first open recruitment class, Kim spent eight years in the United States during which the company acquired Wattpad, North America’s largest web-novel platform, for $600 million, grew to 170 million global MAU, and completed a Nasdaq listing. The team is rounded out by developers from major IT companies.

One app for the whole gathering

truloop is a social platform designed to manage the entire lifecycle of a gathering — from creation and scheduling to meeting, recording, and reminiscing — within a single app. It replaces the familiar routine of jumping between messengers, calendars, and social feeds.

An AI assistant handles the tedious back-and-forth that typically fills group chats. It coordinates with each participant one-on-one, analyzes schedules and availability, proposes optimal timing and venues, and can even complete restaurant reservations.

After the gathering, the AI takes over record-keeping. It automatically collects photos taken by attendees and generates posters, recaps, and short-form videos for sharing. The design lets users capture and share experiences without any separate editing.

Rather than relying on a single AI model, But Beautiful has built a flexible architecture that selects and embeds the optimal AI engine for each feature. The company says the approach helps it stay ahead of a fast-changing AI landscape while sharpening the user experience.

Why CRIT backed it

CRIT Ventures identified But Beautiful’s core strengths as its ability to connect a previously fragmented gathering experience on one platform, its AI-native architecture, and its scalability toward global markets. According to the firm, the social platform market is being reshaped around AI-native services that treat AI not as an add-on feature but as a core interface.

“The social platform market is being reorganized around AI-native services that use AI not as a simple add-on feature but as a core interface,” said Park Song-gun, investment manager at CRIT Ventures. “But Beautiful connects the offline experience of gatherings through AI technology and presents new value, so we expect it to grow rapidly in the global market.”

The framing aligns with Park’s own read on where social media has drifted. He has pointed to the “de-friending” of social networks, noting that the share of friend content people encounter in the Instagram feed has fallen to single digits, and citing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s acknowledgment that the company’s services have shifted from friend-centric toward interest and creator discovery.

“As social services have shifted toward content consumption, their original function of connecting people has gradually weakened,” Park said. “truloop is a platform that will dramatically reduce the unnecessary burden of preparing for and recording gatherings through AI, and help people focus on relationships and experiences themselves.”

truloop positions itself as a return to connecting people directly — targeting a “just us, comfortably” niche and a new “gathering-unit” market.

Global from day one

But Beautiful was designed for global reach from the start. It launched truloop simultaneously in Korea, the United States, and Japan. The company plans to press that expansion further, and it intends to introduce in-app digital goods to give users immediate rewards for using the service and to build an ecosystem that drives continued engagement.

The company has also been selected for the Global TIPS program. The app is currently available on Google Play and the Apple App Store.