About Shobina Jay
Founder. Author. Film-maker.
Shobina Jay is the founder of Kinly, a new model for rebuilding real social circles in an age of disconnection. With a background in sales, business development, and corporate value-mapping, she has spent years working with organisations to identify commercial potential, design sustainable structures, and create human-centred pathways for growth. That grounding shaped the creation of Kinly, a quiet, stabilising system for real friendship, built with research partners and a carefully forming technical team.
Her work moves at the intersection of social innovation, writing, and lived human experience.
Alongside her entrepreneurial work, Shobina is also a novelist and filmmaker, with a growing body of fiction and non-fiction exploring identity, memory, transformation, and the quiet metaphysics of human life. Her published works include My Life Story, The Solomon Archives, Handsome Dark Stranger and The Pomegranate Pages.
She lives in Hampshire, drawing inspiration from the coast and her earlier years in Florence as a student of Italian and English, these landscapes appear frequently in her writing and creative work.
Shobina is currently leading Kinly toward its next development phase:
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Finalising the prototype for a web-based platform focused on intentional, real-life friendship circles,
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Working in dialogue with academic and technical partners,
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Preparing for an early-stage investment round,
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And coordinating a 2025 launch with a small, values-aligned team.
Her vision for Kinly is simple:
A world where people rebuild real community, one friend at a time.
Founders Message
Why I Created Kinly
There’s a line I once read that stayed with me:
“If something happened, no one would know.”
It was shared online, on X. The replies were full of people who understood. I did too.
That sentence became the emotional beginning of Kinly.
Because even when we’re surrounded by digital contact, we can still feel alone. Many of us are. Especially after life changes grief, relocation, loss, redundancy.
Or simply the slow, painful realisation that we’re on the outside looking in, and have been for a while.
There are a lot of us.
I began to wonder: where do we go to begin again? Not with a group. But quietly, with one real connection at a time.
Kinly is my answer to that question.
It’s not another app for matching or performing. It’s a space to choose who you connect with, how, and when.
Apps which rely on spontaneous engagement, overlook a deeper truth, that even in a digital age, people still have human-centered values like trust, timing, and intentionality. Kinly is built with those values at its core.
Groups want to know everything about you. I’ve never felt comfortable with that. Kinly was built for people who value privacy, not secrecy, but space. The kind of space where you can choose what to share, and when.
It’s built for people who value privacy, presence, and small, steady circles of trust.
You don’t have to explain yourself here.
You don’t have to perform.
You can just begin, in your own way, at your own pace.
Because real friendship takes time, space, and trust.
— Shobina Jay
Founder of Kinly