Former Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy recently called loneliness “a growing health epidemic,” but Olivia June Clement (’04) may have developed a cure. Olivia knows what loneliness feels like after moving to San Francisco nine years ago. Her desire to help other women cultivate friendships led her to create Hey! VINA, an online friend-matching service, now available in 158 countries.

“Hey! VINA is a social networking app for women to build and grow community wherever they are in their lives or in the world,” Olivia said, describing it as a cross between a dating app and a magazine. “It’s kind of like Tinder meets Cosmo but it’s strictly about women’s friendship,” she said.

Launched just about two years ago, Hey! VINA scored more than 100,000 users in its first 10 days. The idea evolved from Olivia’s experience as a newcomer to San Francisco. She and a friend co-founded Ladies Who Vino, planning wine events drawing upwards of 100 women each month. The success of that endeavor showed her women’s eagerness for connection. Olivia was already highly attuned to the ways people interact with one another through studying social psychology at Chapman University, working at several tech firms, and being part of Sage Hill’s first in four years graduating class.

“One of the core values that Sage imbued on us from day one is how important our community is around us, so I always deeply valued community,” Olivia said. Sage Hill’s service learning program also instilled in her a commitment to public purpose. “I always wanted to do work that had a positive impact around the world,” she said.

Hey! VINA reflects those values.

But turning a benevolent idea into a business required additional skills that Olivia developed in part at Sage Hill, like collaboration, creativity, and communication. She describes the early days at Sage Hill as “a team effort between the administration, the teachers, and my fellow students, where we all came together on a daily basis to figure out, what did we want this school to be?” Olivia had opportunities to create Sage Hill’s first yearbook and, as a service learning project, to work with a psychology teacher to develop a handbook for the school’s advisors.

By the time she was ready to create Hey! VINA, Olivia drew on her own skills and also reached out to others. After creating a prototype, she enlisted an engineer friend to build out the first version of the app. Hundreds of media outlets took notice, including numerous women’s magazines and The New York Times. Before long, VINA had raised $1.5 million from investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Tinder, Greylock Partners, and Wildcat Venture Partners.

Already, there’s evidence Hey! VINA is having the kind of impact Olivia envisioned. For example, two women in New York—one who had recently relocated from London—met through Hey! VINA and became best friends. One is to be a bridesmaid in the other’s wedding, and their respective fiancé and husband gave them each a French bulldog puppy to celebrate the friendship. Through Hey! VINA, women of all ages, at all stages of life, “have gone from zero friends to many friends and are ultimately finding great connections that are deep and meaningful,” Olivia said.

Hey! VINA is free to join, and also publishes a digital magazine, called “The Vinazine,” at vinazine.com. The team of seven works out of San Francisco, where Olivia still resides.