About Ceen

Ceen maps local events to drive people to music, movement, and art scenes with less stress and more frequency. We design our platform to promote impromptu community events in physical proximity.  Ceen is an independent benefit corporation launched in Oakland in October 2025 by Varun Bhargava and Lucy Stephenson.

Our customers are venues, event organizers, and individual culture hustlers: musicians, artists, physical trainers, chefs, performers, etc. We provide ceen’s map as a novel digital marketing tool, whereby simply dropping a digital poster on our map (plus our shared marketing of that map) can help communities show up.

Vision

We create gentle, human-first, private-by-design technology that helps event hosts drive social connection and physical activity in cities. A well-attended mesh of events drives foot traffic, civic fabric, and freedom from digital-physical isolation. This means more creative employment, less street-level vacancies, and improved public safety. 

Join us in real life, on nerd stuff + style stuff

For the newsletter: we share what we're learning. We share little brain snacks about urban design and policy and public health/safety.

For real life: We share where we'll be next, if you wanna take a break with emails like these.

Send us along to good people

It takes a whole community to make good scenes and this Ceen work. We're running this tiny company in a relatively indie, super grassroots way...and would love your help using the map, sharing it, or dropping us your ideas at 510@ceen.live

About Us

Varun and Lucy just want more local events for their own shared sanity and joy, for the sake of the random person sitting one row over on BART or AC Transit, and as a path towards healthier and happier and kinder and safer cities.

For investor purposes, we were housemates at UC Berkeley’s environmental design graduate school. We get technical infrastructure and social infrastructure alike. Varun develops high tech geospatial software for cities and climate science agencies, often building products from scratch.  Lucy builds partnerships from startups to Fortune 100, from Autonomous Vehicle safety to international security for women in particular, hospitality in general, and media for kids.