By Kim Kalunian, WPRO News

At 26, Ben Anderson’s Boston-based tech startup is gaining users and investors. “Amino” has already secured $1.6 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures, the same firm that backed Twitter and Tumblr.

It’s good company to be in for a startup that only officially launched in January of 2013.

Amino is the brainchild of Anderson and co-founder Yin Wang.

Born in New Mexico, Anderson moved with his family to Providence when he was in the first grade. He spent his elementary and secondary school years at the prestigious Moses Brown School before going on to study the music industry at Northeastern University. It was during college, learning the ins and outs of the music business, that he caught his entrepreneurial bug.

Now Anderson serves as the CEO of Amino Apps.

“Amino is a network of mobile apps and each app is exclusively for a single interest,” explains Anderson. These “interest communities” meld blogging, chat rooms, polls and in-depth discussions so folks with shared interests can “geek out” – as Anderson puts it – together.

“We have interest community for Anime, ‘Doctor Who,’ K-pop, Minecraft…all of these kind of niche interests that people get really passionate about,” says Anderson.

Anderson and Wang were inspired to create the mobile app after learning about each other’s niche passions: Wang was big into Anime, and Anderson loved robotics, but neither was finding a surplus of folks in their immediate friend circles who had the same passions. One day, while tooling around downtown Boston, the pair stumbled upon an Anime convention inside the Hynes Convention Center.

“It was a light bulb moment,” explains Anderson. “We saw that people, these complete strangers, actually were making friends pretty instantly just because they had this shared passion. So we wanted to bottle that experience up and allow people to kind of experience that, anytime, anywhere through their mobile device.”

Together the pair, with Wang’s technical expertise and Anderson’s business savvy, launched Amino Apps officially in 2013. Last year, Union Square Ventures, the same venture capital firm that invested in Twitter, Tumblr and Kickstarter, invested $1.6 million in Amino.

In July of 2014, Andy Weissman, a partner at Union Square Ventures, wrote a glowing post about Amino, boasting that the app had already been downloaded more than a half a million times.

While Anderson won’t disclose precise numbers of users or downloads just yet, he does say engagement is good – people are logging on several times a day, sometimes using the app for upwards of a half an hour.

With the heightened interest and hefty investment, Anderson was able to grow Amino from just a dorm-room experiment with his co-founder, to a bustling business.

“It’s exciting times to go from just me and my co-founder working to a ten person team,” said Anderson.

But it’s not all fun and games for Anderson, who says it takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears and time to be a successful entrepreneur.

“It’s all about doing something that you’re really passionate about,” he says. “To run a successful startup requires lots and lots of hours of work. You almost need to get to the level of being obsessed.”

Obsession (about anything) is what Anderson is hoping will drive folks to download Amino, and eventually start their own interest communities. Right now, Amino launches and manages their own niche interest communities, but eventually, Anderson wants communities to be user-generated.

“The Amino vision is to have a community for every interest in the world: every popular TV show, every popular movie franchise…you name it,” he said. “We want to enable others to start their own communities.”

Which gets at where the whole Amino name comes from: it’s a nod to amino acids, nature’s building blocks of sort, those small parts of something much bigger.

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