Exclusive: Eigen raises a seed round from Benchmark to build the world’s first ‘mutual friend’

More than 600 million people watched the moon landing live in 1969. When NASA’s Artemis program returned astronauts to the lunar surface, an estimated 27 million tuned in, even as the world’s population had doubled. The shared cultural experience, the kind that once stitched strangers together, has quietly collapsed—and Paul Scherer thinks AI is about to make it worse before anyone tries to make it better.

That gap is what Eigen is betting on. The stealth AI startup has raised a $15 million seed round from Benchmark with Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann and Dreamer founder David Singleton (who later sold his company to Meta) joining as angel investors, Fortune learned exclusively. 

Scherer, the company’s 22-year-old founder, grew up in a village of fewer than 1,000 people outside Frankfurt, Germany. He left high school at 17, taught himself to code, and arrived in San Francisco in May 2025 on a one-way flight and an O-1 visa. Before that, he helped scale Augment—a Paris-based........

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