Finding ways to connect with others can be difficult for students at the University of Florida.
Social media apps tend to only post flyers of organizations without further engagement.
The new version of the Gathr app is expected to release at the beginning of Fall 2025. The original version was released in Fall 2024 but shut down at the start of Spring 2025 due to a lack of user engagement.
Rithik Raja, founder of Gathr and a UF alumnus from the Class of 2024, said he created the app to help students find clubs catered to their interests, while helping clubs grow their membership and foster direct student-club interactions.
He was inspired to create Gathr after struggling to find community on campus after moving to Gainesville from India.
“When I came to college, it was really difficult to get involved,” Raja said. “[Most people] have friends coming in from high school … they have people advising them to go to so-and-so club. I didn’t have any of that.”
He wanted Gathr to be more useful than GatorConnect, UF’s official platform to help students find clubs, Raja said.
“You can only do basic search functions,” he said. “All the links and websites are pretty outdated.”
Gathr will have a simple approach, Raja said. A user logs in with their student ID and is immediately presented with events related to their interests.
He hopes Gathr becomes university-licensed and advertised for incoming freshmen.
Manuel Marmol, a 21-year-old UF advertising senior and CEO of Gathr, is working to make the upcoming version of the app more user-friendly.
Three months after launching the original version of Gathr, he said engagement went down rapidly. Raja brought him on board to help reinvent the app.
Marmol said the previous version was “way more technical,” and “there were a lot more buttons you needed to click.”
“We redesigned it so that it was simple, and anybody’s grandma could understand it,” he said.
Gathr gradually became more of a social media app, straying away from the original mission of strengthening the connection between students and clubs — but the new version of Gathr will revert to its original goal.
“There’s Facebook, there’s TikTok, there’s Instagram – we’re not beating them,” he said. “But there is no competition in finding your organization, finding your community, especially in the university world.”
Kriti Shah, a 20-year-old UF computer science and marketing junior and Gathr’s head of marketing, said she wants the app to be fun and college-oriented.
“It’s an app that we made, by students, for students,” she said.
The first step is to spread awareness of Gathr while Shah implements social media trends to help boost engagement.
To do so, Devh Thenepalli, a 19-year-old UF pre-med biology sophomore and associate of marketing for Gathr, has taken the role of an actor for its Instagram.
When Thenepalli left Minnesota for UF, he didn’t know anyone, he said. He based his performances on his experiences as a freshman.
“I was trying to act like, ‘Oh, I don’t have many friends, but I want to make friends,’” Thenepalli said. “‘This is the way I do it: Download Gathr.’”
He said he wants to capture the freshman experience and have the audience relate to him. He hopes the app succeeds in accomplishing its goal of helping freshmen “find their place” through campus involvement.
Colby Kistner is a UF journalism junior with a specialization in sports and media.
