WALL STREET JOURNAL - May 29 - When Greg Blatt announced his plan to resign as Match Group CEO in 2017, the company presented the transition as orderly and planned well in advance. Privately, executives at Match Group and IAC expressed concerns that a sexual-assault allegation against the CEO might become public and discussed how long to say the transition had been in the works, according to documents filed this week in a lawsuit the companies have been battling in New York state court. "The company has nothing to hide," a spokesperson for IAC said in a statement. A lawsuit filed in 2018 over Tinder's valuation included a claim from Rosette Pambakian, a former Tinder VP, that Mr. Blatt groped and harassed her at a company party in Dec 2016. The suit says Match Group knew about the allegation but played it down to keep Mr. Blatt in place as he worked on the valuation. Mr. Blatt has said in a defamation lawsuit against Ms. Pambakian that the incident was consensual. Match Group fired Ms. Pambakian in 2018. She filed a wrongful termination suit against Match Group and IAC in California state court, saying that the firing was connected to her going public with her sexual-assault allegation. Match Group has denied that claim.
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Former Match Group's Employees Spar Over Handling of Sexual-Assault Allegation
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OPW - May 31 - We're dedicated to providing executive summaries on the news you can use, to get smarter, and make better decisions.
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Toronto Man Creates Dating App That Celebrates Asian Culture
CBC.CA - May 28 - New dating app, called Alike, is the brainchild of Hanmin Yang, a Korean-Canadian living in Toronto. CBC News spoke to Yang about what inspired him to create the app, and what he hopes users take away from it.
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Grindr Sponsors French Second-Tier Rugby Club
BLOOMBERG - May 28 - Players at French rugby club Biarritz Olympique will carry the name and logo of Grindr on their shirts in a rare sponsorship deal that kicks in next season. The club will receive ~$1.2M a year under the deal.
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London-based Paired Lands €2.9M
EU STARTUPS - May 26 - Paired, a leading app to improve romantic relationships, has raised €2.9M in seed funding, bringing the total raised by the company to date ~€3.7M. Paired is a fun, evidence-based app that prompts daily conversations between partners. Since launching in October 2020 it has ~5K paying subscribers, with growing audiences in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. The investment will accelerate the company’s global growth ambitions and scale up its product development efforts, giving users personalised recommendations based on their relationship interests and needs.
by Charlotte Tucker
See full article at EU Startups
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com
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Meet Schmooze, a Meme-Based Dating App
TECH CRUNCH - May 26 - Schmooze combines machine learning and memes to connect people based on humor algorithm. A beta test in late summer with 200 Stanford students has since led to 10K downloads around the country. Currently ~200 memes are added each day, while others are deleted. 90K matches have been made to date. It recently closed on $270K in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and others to tinker with its product.
by Connie Loizos
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com
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New Dating App Thursday Launches Today
MIRROR.CO.UK - May 26 - Friends George Rawlings and Matt McNeill Love have set up a brand new dating app - Thursday - which launches today. Instead of spending evening after evening scrolling through potential matches, Thursday will only let users log on once a week. Thursday also offers a 'stories' which allow users to share short video clips with potential matches that are automatically deleted after 24 hours. All matches and conversation disappear at midnight on Thursday.
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How Match's Black and Hispanic Dating Apps Are Helping Close the Vaccine Gap
FAST COMPANY - May 26 - The Biden administration is turning to dating apps to help push more young people to get vaccinated. Chispa and BLK's campaigns are especially important. Only 9% of total vaccinations have gone to Black people, who represent 12% of the population, and 13% to Hispanics, who represent 17% of the population. Across 41 states, white people have been vaccinated at a rate 1.5 times higher than Black people, and 1.4 times higher than Hispanics. Working to fix the disparities, the Biden White House has recruited dating apps. Last week, the White House announced an "outside initiative" with Match Group. Across its roster of apps, Match is set to roll out incentives for its users to get vaccinated. The aim is not solely to reward the vaccinated, but to educate people.
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Y Combinator-backed Matchmaking Startup Betterhalf.ai Raises $3M
YOUR STORY - May 26 - BetterHalf.ai, the AI-driven matrimonial app, has raised $3M in a pre-Series A round. The startup will use the funding to boost its app engagement, build monetisation features, and product discovery across organic channels, it said in a statement. Earlier, Betterhalf.ai had raised a $2.3M seed round from Y Combinator, Tribe Capital, Nurture Ventures, and Saurabh Garg (Founder/CBO, NoBroker) and Shailesh Rao (Ex-MD of Google India, former Partner, TPG Capital). Founded in 2016 by MIT graduate Rahul Namdev and serial entrepreneur Pawan Gupta, the AI platform uses predictive analysis to help professionals find a match through compatibility scores based on relationship dimensions and their interactions on the product.
by Sindhu Kashyaap
See full article at Your Story
See the top news on Betterhalf.ai
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com
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Meet Anuradha Gupta, the Founder of 'Vows for Eternity' Matchmaking Service
SHE THE PEOPLE - May 26 - Headquartered in New York, Vows for Eternity is a personalised matchmaking service that caters to millennials, and has an established presence in Bombay, Delhi and London.
Q: What makes someone join Vows for Eternity?
A: Most users have spent time on an education, their profession or business, and in this process, have not had the time and opportunity to meet like-minded people like themselves.
Q: How do members decide they've found "the one"?
A: I think there comes a realisation that this is not just a person you can live with, but someone you can't live without. Marriage is very fragile. I think both people should be invested in each other's growth.
Q: How do you define a successful marriage?
A: Marriage is a safe-space that two people share. Trying to change someone to fit into your idea of a "perfect partner" never works. Acceptance of your partner whole-heartedly, as they are, is what makes for a successful marriage.
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Coffee Meets Bagel Prepares for Post-Pandemic Dating
YAHOO FINANCE - May 26 - CEO of Coffee Meets Bagel, Dawoon Kang, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss their new 'ready to meet' tool to make people comfortable dating post-pandemic and how the pandemic has changed dating. Ready to Meet makes it easy for users to indicate if they're ready to meet in person. 65% of said they are more likely to like somebody who is vaccinated. Watch the full interview here.
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Match's Jared Sine - 'Not Your Everyday $30B Reverse Spin-off'
DALLAS BUSINESS JOURNAL - May 26 - As 2019 wound down, executives at Match Group and IAC, agreed that it was time to separate the online dating service provider from its parent company because Match, valued at ~$30B, had grown to be two-thirds of IAC's value. The problem was a traditional spinoff would have created huge tax burdens for IAC shareholders. The team, which included Match Group Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine, agreed that the transaction had to be structured as a "reverse spin-off," which meant that IAC's non-Match assets would be placed into the new publicly traded entity. "This was a massively complex transaction," said Sine. Sine, the Match Group legal department and Debevoise are a finalist for the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Deal of the Year. The finalists will be celebrated and the winners announced at an in-person ceremony on June 3 at the George Bush Institute. The $30B reverse spin-off was not Sine's only accomplishment in 2020. Last summer, Sine also settled a highly contentious IP lawsuit with Bumble. And he and his team negotiated a $1.725B acquisition of Hyperconnect, a social discovery app based in Seoul, South Korea. Sine made news again last month when he testified for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about anticompetitive practices of Apple and Google regarding their domination of the app platform space.
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S'More: "Tinder-fication" of Online Dating Is Over
FORBES - May 26 - New data gathered by the dating app company S'More suggests that putting chemistry ahead of "hotness" and relationships over casual encounters may become the new norm in online dating, and some of the biggest players in the industry are getting in on the trend. S'More survey found that physical attraction was no longer rated as the most important factor when searching for a potential match. "Covid-19 certainly changed the equation," says CEO Cohen-Aslatei. "But beyond that, our data shows that people are starting to expect more from dating apps. They want real connections, not the fake photos and hyper-sexualization that has characterized so much of online dating over the past decade." S'More has developed a suite of features aimed to reduce the superficiality of online dating, and slow down the process. For one, users aren't able to view a clear photo of a potential match until they have had a meaningful conversation with that person. S'More is not alone in its effort. Tinder and Bumble recently added games to their video product, MeetMe added blurred video dating, and Chispa, a Match Group app for Latino and Latina singles, connects daters based on answers to trivia games. MuzMatch, a Muslim-focused dating app, also lets women keep their profiles blurred from men.
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ParshipMeet Group Adds MocoSpace to a List of Livestreaming Partners
BUSINESSWIRE - May 25 - ParshipMeet Group, a leading provider of interactive dating solutions, will provide livestreaming video to MocoSpace, a social gaming and chat app, through its Live video Platform as a Service (vPaaS) product. ParshipMeet's vPaaS solution powers Live video for some of the world's largest livestreaming video dating apps.
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