TECH CRUNCH - Mar 25 - Bae (Before Anyone Else) is a mobile dating app for Black people created by three students - Jordan Kunzika, Brian Gerrard and Justin Gerrard. They hosted an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) tour which consisted of parties and mixers where people who matched on Bae could meet in person. Within a few weeks of their April 2015 launch, they reached 17K downloads, and have grown over ten times since. Similar to other dating apps, Bae users swipe right for those they're interested in and left for those they're not. According to the founders what makes Bae different is their algorithm to offer better matches.
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Students Build Bae, An App For Black Singles
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Badoo Launches Photo Verification
TECH CRUNCH - Mar 25 - Badoo is launching photo-verification and verified profiles to make online dating safer. When a user signs up, they'll be asked to verify their profile. Users can opt out, but that means they might be excluded from view for other users who have chosen to connect only with verified users. If they choose to verify, Badoo will send them a request for a photo with the person performing a specific gesture.
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Dating App Clover's New "Mixers" Are Like 90s Chat Rooms
BUSTLE.COM - Mar 25 - Dating app Clover just launched "Mixers," which resemble chatrooms in the 90s. The "Mixers" function lets singles create and join forums dedicated to different topics.
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New Dating App Dine Wants People To Go On First Date Quickly
BUSINESS INSIDER - Mar 24 - Tokyo-based Mrk & Co has recently launched a new dating app in the US and Canada called "Dine." The goal of Dine is to get users offline as quickly as possible. After filling out a profile, members pick three restaurants where they'd want to go on a date. Dine then shows them 2-5 people per day to invite on a date.
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Smell Dating Uses Dirty T-Shirts For Matchmaking
REUTERS - Mar 24 - Smell Dating is a New York matchmaking service that promises to help single people sniff out their perfect match by breathing in the odors from dirty T-shirts. The idea is based on the science of pheromones. The founders describe it as an art project. Each of its first 100 clients received a T-shirt to wear for three days straight without bathing. The clients then mailed the T-shirts back to be cut into swatches. Smell Dating then sent batches of 10 mixed swatches back to the clients to sniff.
by Barbara Goldberg & Angela Moore
See full article at Reuters
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How Online Dating Works Better Than Offline Dating
WASHINGTON POST - Mar 23 - "The fear that online dating is creating unhealthy habits is being driven more by paranoia than by actual facts, according to Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford who has been conducting a long-running study of online dating. "I don't see in my data any negative repercussions for people who meet partners online. People who meet their partners online are not more likely to break up", he says. Once you're in a relationship with somebody, it doesn't really matter how you met. There's always a fear that comes with a new technology. One of the things he has found out is that people who meet online progress to marriage faster than people who meet offline. Because people can be more selective and there tends to be extensive communication before the first date.
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Female Friendly Dating App Siren Raised $500K
GEEKWIRE - Mar 22 - Siren, the dating app that lets women make the first move, has raised $500K of a planned $750,000 seed round. The dating app, which won App of the Year at last year's GeekWire Awards, will use the money to further develop their platform and user base. Currently, the app has ~20K users.
by Madeline Vuong
See full article at Geekwire
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
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Comment Policy
OPW - Mar 23 - This is a forum for open and fair discussion but this is also a forum for professionals. It's important that someone's reputation stand behind each comment. Please include your name and contact email when posting a comment. If you choose to be anonymous and a company complains specifically about your comment because it is anonymous and derogatory, we will be inclined to remove it.
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks.
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DAN Fund Raises $2.5M, Invests 650K In ThreeDayRule
D MAGAZINE - Mar 23 - The DAN Fund's third fund has raised $2.5M and already invested $650K in its first portfolio company - Three Day Rule. Three Day Rule is a LA matchmaking company backed by IAC (It serves as the exclusive provider of personalized matchmaking services to The Match Group). The DAN Fund was the lead investor in Three Day Rule's Series A round of $1.2M in 2014.
by Danielle Abril
See full article at D Magazine
See all posts on Three Day Rule
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
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Tinder Announces Management Changes
VANITYFAIR - Mar 23 - Four new, experienced executives are joining Tinder: Maria Zhang, most recently of Yahoo, is becoming Tinder's VP of engineering; YouTube and Google's Derek Callow will take on the role of VP of international; James Kim of TigerText will be VP of finance; and former Starz Entertainment executive Ferrell McDonald will be the company's new CMO.
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Single Mother Raised $2M For Her New Company From WhatsYourPrice.com Sugar Daddy
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK - Mar 23 - Samantha DeFazio joined the controversial dating site WhatsYourPrice.com in 2014. The site allows men to bid on attractive women to go on a date with them. Samantha, who has been paid up to $600 for an evening out, pitched her idea for a luxury taxi service driven by attractive women to her dates. She has received $2M from one of her suitors who was inspired to invest in her app.
See full article at DailyMail.co.uk
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Dating App Bumble Offers Political Filters
DAILYTIMES - Mar 21 - Bumble, the dating app where ladies make the move by messaging matches first, is now offering political filters so users can see who someone is voting for before they swipe right or left.
The full article was originally published at Daily Times, but is no longer available.
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Most Popular Words Used In Online Dating Profiles
WIDEOPENCOUNTRY - Mar 21 - Mashable partnered with Match.com to analyze thousands of its dating profiles, and create a map of the US that shows each state labeled with the term most commonly found in online dating profiles.
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China Is The Biggest Gay Dating Market
ADVOCATE - Mar 18 - Earlier this year, the Beijing Kunlun Tech Company bought a majority stake in Grindr. Recently, China banned all TV programming depicting gay and lesbian couples. Yet the Chinese business was "excited" to invest $93M in the app. The world's most popular same-sex matchmaking app is Chinese Blued. Blued alone has ~15M users. "People in China are less open about homosexuality, but the beautiful thing about the smartphone is that it's a private device," said Blued investor David Chao.
by Daniel Reynolds
See full article at Advocate
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Ask.fm Founders Back Dating App Mint
TECH CRUNCH - Mar 17 - The founders of Ask.fm, the social Q&A app that became embroiled in a cyberbullying media storm before being acquired by IAC, have backed new dating app Mint. Through their startup builder Balaclava Lab, Ilja Terebin, Mark Terebin and Oskar Liepins have invested $1M in the young company. Launched in December, Mint is pitched as a location-based mobile dating app that helps users meet with people nearby.
by Steve O'Hear
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
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