Fika began in Vietnam, founded by Denise Sandquist after she found her biological mother there in 2016 and saw, firsthand, the social pressure on Vietnamese women to find meaningful connection. What started as one woman’s mission to help people connect grew quickly into one of the country’s most-used connection platforms.
But Denise had always seen Fika as more than an app. The original vision was about connecting people — for friendship and for love — in a way that actually worked. As it scaled, she grew increasingly convinced that the format itself was the problem: endless browsing and messaging back and forth before two people ever met. It wasn’t connection. It was a simulation of connection.
So she made the decision to strip almost everything back and rebuild from scratch. Not a pivot — a return to the original idea: get people offline, into real meetings with real people. Fika launched the MVP of the new product in Sweden in May 2025. The official new version of Fika launched in June 2026.
The vision has remained the same throughout: use technology to connect people in real life, for friendship and for love — permanently, not as a transition to somewhere else.
