For years, whenever people asked Keegan what she did for a living, her answers were usually conversation stoppers: She worked in finance, then fintech. All that changed in late 2018, when she cofounded Dipsea, a subscription app that sells audio erotica, mostly to young women. 

Backed by $5.5 million in funding, Dipsea is like Calm or Headspace, only instead of helping you meditate, its mission is to turn you on. The app looks and feels like a millennial playground, with its sleek design, vibrant colors, and playful illustrations, but its short, sexy stories are for everyone: couples navigating long-term monogamy, people who are newly single, those working through sexual trauma. “We create narrative stories meant to inspire and create a mood,” says Keegan, Dipsea’s chief technology officer. “These stories are great for people who are experimenting or renegotiating their sexuality.”

Keegan and her cofounder, Gina Gutierrez, hatched the idea for Dipsea over late-night conversations with friends about how hard it was to find erotic content they actually liked. There’s a good reason for that: Studies show that most women are aroused by imagining scenarios, not viewing pornography. So Keegan and Gutierrez set out to make their own. At first, they penned Dipsea stories themselves. Now their San Francisco firm has an in-house story studio, a stable of freelance writers and voice actors, 14 employees—and more than 300,000 downloads.

 Whatever your persuasion, Dipsea’s hallmark is authenticity: “A story about a trans person is written by a trans writer,” says Keegan. “Making it feel real from top to bottom makes it compelling and different and really good.”

As one New Yorker writer put it after sampling hours of audio erotica, Dipsea was the “one source of audio smut [that] didn’t make us recoil.”