Hey! Vina is an app which aims to help women tap into the power of their extended networks to make new friends in the real world.

Though the advancement of the Internet and social media has created a world more globalized than ever before, it will come as a shock to very few to recognise how lonely an experience adult life can feel at times.

This situation can be particularly familiar to time poor professional women who have changed careers or perhaps moved to a new city and are struggling to expand their social circle. HEY, Vina is a friendship-building app founded by two friends – Olivia June Poole and Jenn Aprahamian – who found themselves in this predicament and sought to remedy the problem.

Hey,VINA starts with a general quiz designed to get the basic details of an individual’s lifestyle. It then generates potential matches using an algorithm based on shared interests, geographical location and mutual friends. In this way it is less reductive and superficial than an app such as Tinder.

There may be some who would cite this as further evidence of a generation that is rapidly ceding the ability to genuinely connect with other individuals and their immediate surroundings in a meaningful way. For modern professional women who for various reasons have found their social circles shrinking, Hey, VINA could become an invaluable tool.

Although currently only available in San Francisco and New York in beta mode, if successful, Hey! VINA will surely reach European shores sooner rather than later.