Social community

Candle

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Most relationships, romantic or platonic, don’t end in one moment, they drift apart over time. Missed check-ins, surface-level conversations, busy lives, and routines replace real connection. Candle helps couples and friends stay close through 1-minute daily rituals that bring back presence, play, and curiosity.

Candle gives couples and friends a daily, low-pressure game designed to create emotional momentum: the most essential, and often most neglected, ingredient in long-term connection.

What started as a swipeable questions game has grown into a full platform and private space for your relationship:

- Daily Prompts & Games: Thoughtful, funny, and unexpected questions, couple quizzes, audio and photo challenges that update and adapt monthly

- Shared Canvas Widget: Leave notes, doodles, or drawings right on each other’s home screen

- Now in beta: Date Ideas Swiping**: Get 60 curated date ideas based on your area (yes, even San Francisco :)), updated weekly. Swipe to match on what you both want to try. From pop-up events to hidden gems, it’s the easiest way to try something new together or even with friends or family! We’d love feedback here!

- Streaks & Shared Progress — Build accountability and a shared rhythm

- Adaptive Decks: Smarter, more relevant questions over time

- Shared Photo Albums & Memories: Keep track of all your photos and logged memories

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08

Founders & team

Previously Encore, Encore AI Labs, Encore, Candle - Couple Games & Photos

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

Alex Ruber

Founder/CEO

Co-founder, CEO @ Encore, building design-first consumer AI products that help people build better habits Ex iOS/Arch Engineer @ Apple Ex Flight Systems/Sequencing Engineer @ NASA JPL Non-technical hobbies: soccer, surfing, art, F1

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Parth Chopra

Founder/CTO

Co-founder & CTO of Encore - building for the future generation of consumer AI. Prior to this, worked on ads relevance & ranking @ Twitter, and architected changes to the sharing/permissions framework @ Asana. Hobbies: math, thrifting, discovering new music, 3B1B youtube videos, cutting hair

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
2team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthverified profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding year