History
A short timeline
Not every milestone—just the shape of the journey, kept high-level on purpose.
Product demo
A walkthrough of what Pigeon looked like in practice.
2020
A tool born from family need
During COVID, Pigeon was built and launched to make lending and borrowing money between friends and family less awkward—contracts, reminders, tracking, and payments in one place.
2021
Community, capital, Miami
Early users found the product. The company raised an early friends-and-family round, joined accelerators, and moved to Miami as the team committed full-time.
Early 2022
Y Combinator and a seed round
Pigeon joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch and closed a seed round covered in the Miami tech press—fuel to grow the product and the story.
Mid 2022
National attention
Forbes, CNBC, and local TV picked up the idea. The core product moved toward free access so more people could try formalizing loans with people they already trusted.
Late 2022
Mobile apps, more volume
iOS and Android apps shipped. Loan volume kept growing as more households mixed money with relationships through the platform.
2023
Culture and coverage
Broader press—Andscape, Motley Fool, PYMNTS, and others—explored interpersonal lending and the product’s place in it. Freemium features matured.
2024
Scale meets gravity
Usage and loan volume continued. The Wall Street Journal covered the category. Under the surface, unit economics and compliance expectations for money movement got harder to reconcile.
2025
Sunset
Thin margins and rising operational requirements made a durable path forward unlikely. Pigeon entered read-only mode in September and wound down by December—choosing a responsible close over a fragile stretch.
Now
This site
usepigeon.io remains as a small memorial: the story, the press, and a few archived Carrier posts—so search engines and people can still find that Pigeon existed.