Courtesy of Elle Wilson; Nandini Mullaji; Anushka Joshi
The pitchforks are out and sharper than ever for the major dating apps.
Singles fatigued by major players like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are declaring themselves celibate or simply turning back to their exes. Just this year, nearly 80% of Americans surveyed by Forbes said they felt fatigued by dating apps.
It's created chaos for the swipe-built businesses. Bumble's stock has dropped over 50% this year as the company rethinks its women-message-first model. Meanwhile, Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, was sued this year for allegedly making their apps addictive, though Match Group has denied the claims.
Some see this as an opportunity. Around the world, startup founders have sensed that the dating industry is ripe for disruption.
Sydney Bradley/Business Insider
In New York City, two healthcare workers who had never started a business are diving headfirst into reimagining the double date. In Paris, a woman who worked for Microsoft leveraged decades of experience in tech to create a digital map of missed connections. And on Instagram, influencer Serena Kerrigan took matters into her own hands by letting followers shoot their shots in a mass group chat.
"I want to scare the shit out of Hinge and Bumble — all of them," said Kerrigan, who has about 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. "I want to really disrupt the space."
Investors, too, are paying attention. Rex Woodbury, the founder of Daybreak Ventures, told BI earlier this summer that internet dating companies were "very disruptable in this moment."
Business Insider spoke with founders of 11 startups who believe they have the next great innovation in dating.
When setting out to build a dating app, swiping fatigue was top of mind for Pique Dating founders Vaish Sesetty and Cyrus Belsoi. The two previously worked at AWS and Datadog, respectively.
Courtesy of Pique Dating
"We're trying to get people to actually see people as people here," Belsoi told BI.
The Pique app, which provides people with up to six matches per day after a user answers a multiple-choice question, has no swiping involved.
In addition to its low-tech app, Pique Dating also hosts in-person events in New York City. The founders host speed-dating parties where people answer a single question before the event begins, and on weekends in Brooklyn, they host a pop-up in McCarren Park where park-goers can snap a picture in real time, write out a bio, and passersby can inquire about the singles posted on the wall.
Meanwhile, in France, tech professional Karima Ben Abdelmalek, with a background in Microsoft and Dailymotion, felt that dating apps needed a more social element as far back as 2014.
Abdelmalek created Happn, where users turn on their location and are notified when they've bumped into another Happn user while going about their day-to-day lives. The hope is that you meet like-minded singles in the places you already frequent — bars, restaurants, and concerts.
"Singles today are looking to bring back real-life encounters, like going to bars and restaurants," Abdelmalek told BI. "Our mission today is to bring back people meeting offline."
While Happn launched nearly a decade ago, the app was ahead of its time in terms of prioritizing in-person connection over swiping and DMing.
Other startups, like First Round's on Me, are prioritizing in-app actions that direct users to set up a date instead of endlessly swiping.
"It's so easy to swipe — it's like a game," FROM's cofounder and CEO Joe Feminella said. "It's like you're playing Tetris or something, and that's kind of what dehumanized it for me."
Courtesy of FROM
FROM, which Feminella cofounded with his wife Hannah (who not-so-ironically met through Hinge), encourages users to "go on a date" and get out into the world. While the app does have a stack of potential matches on its app that users can click through, there is no swipe.
In August, FROM announced it raised $3 million in seed funding from family-run fund Manna Group.
Sometimes, the matchmakers are the friends we make along the way.
Elle Wilson, dating coach and founder of the NYC-based dating event series Met Through Friends, was planning dinner parties for her friends in 2022. Like many 20-something-year-olds, Wilson's friends often complained about the trials and tribulations of dating.
"Yes, things feel really challenging for people who are dating and people who are single and don't want to be, but I know they know lots of great people," Wilson said. "What if we got them all in a room together and saw what happened?"
Courtesy of Elle Wilson
Her events, which now bring together about 300 attendees each month, require people to bring a friend with them — a built-in wingman.
Dating with friends is also the premise of Fourplay, which believes the future of dating is double or nothing. Singles make joint profiles with their friends and match with other duos, but founders Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs don't see the term "double date" as exclusively a pairing-off situation.
Nicole Fara Silver
"There really are no expectations with Fourplay," Dietzek said. Instead, the founders see Fourplay as an invitation for a friendship, a relationship, or simply a fun night out. The point is to make meeting new people less stressful and less lonely simply by doing it with a friend.
"They're doing something together, as opposed to being isolated on their own devices and going at singlehood alone," Dietzek said.
But sometimes your friends can't be there on your first date.
Anushka Joshi, founder of Friend of a Friend, is launching a dating app focused on mutual connections to make dating less daunting.
"Dating is probably one of the biggest decisions or activities that we do in our 20s and beyond," Joshi said. "My friends and I were just coming up against a lot of problems."
Everything from post-pandemic awkwardness to dating apps growing into colossal businesses "made it hard for us to date," Joshi added.
But meeting someone through a friend felt more natural. In fact, it's how Hinge originally made its pitch to new users in 2014. Feeling that the dating app market had abandoned this form of connection, Joshi started building Friend of a Friend earlier this year and plans to launch an app in the fall. Users will share their contact book data with the app and be able to see how many mutual connections they share with other users on the app.
Courtesy of Anushka Joshi
"Maybe it's naive or hopeful of me, but I just want people to have an experience on the app where it's like, 'I'm really meeting someone that I connect with' instead of feeling like, 'Oh, that was just another shitty date [with] another stranger,'" Joshi said.
Boo Dating founder Derek Lee wants personality to shine through the small screen.
"When dating moved online, it created a ton of winners and losers," Lee told BI. Picture-first profiles drove users to care more about looks than the potential real-life chemistry two users might have, Lee believes.
Along with his two cofounders, Lee designed Boo to "jailbreak the swiping mode" by allowing users to share memes, art, poetry, and geek out on their interests with other uses, rather than just building a perfectly manicured profile.
Courtesy of Boo Dating
Hashtag "universes," with topics like #fashion and #outdoors, are central to the Boo experience, where users can meet like-minded matches. Boo users still create profiles and swipe, however, but are shown compatible profiles partially based on an MBTI-like personality quiz they take when they register.
"Instead of just waiting for a swipe back, you can engage, have fun, tell jokes, and share memes," Lee said. "It is a much more dynamic experience."
NYC lawyer Katya Chernyak was likewise disillusioned by the gap between stunning profiles online and lackluster in-person dates.
"I was wasting so much time," Chernyak recalled to BI. "I wanted an honest platform where you could experience that person right off the bat, which would lead to higher quality matches."
In 2023, Chernyak followed her frustration out of her legal career and, along with two cofounders, launched the video-profile dating app FFWD. Looking directly into the camera, users answer five question prompts, like "What's expensive, but worth it?" and "What would your friends say is your best quality?"
FFWD allows users as many takes as they need, but bans any quick edits or filters.
Courtesy of FFWD
After expanding out of NYC to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, the next frontier for FFWD is an algorithm that understands the nuances of capturing personality on video, like whether users gravitate to responses with more humor or more flowery language.
"We want to draw more rich conclusions about who you are better matched with in real life," Chernyak said.
One of the biggest dating apps out there isn't even a dating app — it's Instagram.
"Everyone's online," content creator and dating podcast host Serena Kerrigan said. "They don't want to be on the dating apps, but a lot of people are OK with a DM slide-in."
Kerrigan, who used to host an Instagram Live show about dating sponsored by Bumble, recently started using Instagram's Broadcast Channel to connect singles. Her community, Let's Fucking Date, brings nearly 3,000 people together in a one-sided group chat where Kerrigan shares three new singles weekly and encourages her followers to shoot their shot.
Courtesy of Serena Kerrigan
"It normalizes you being able to slide into someone's DM, which feels more intentional and approachable than a swipe on a Hinge or a Bumble," Kerrigan said.
In addition to running the Instagram-based dating channel, Kerrigan also sells a dating card game with conversation prompts, also called "Let's Fucking Date."
Beyond finding a new match, some dating startups are trying to help people navigate the various stages of dating with coaching.
"There's this huge gap in the market around, weirdly enough, education," said Nandini Mullaji, matchmaker and founder of AI-powered dating coaching app Sitch.
Mullaji, who herself is happily married, has been setting people up on dates in 2024 by collecting information through a form she'd shared with her Substack, Instagram, and TikTok followers. What started as a goal to set up 50 dates snowballed into setting up more than 200 people, she told BI.
Courtesy of Nandini Mullaji
She's now building a new app called Sitch to help people navigate the dating process using AI, which she trained to replicate the flow of conversation one would have with a professional matchmaker.
"You can put in screenshots, you can put in your dating app profile, you can put in other people's dating app profiles to figure out what the opening line should be, all of that," Mullaji said. On top of coaching, the app will also include a matchmaking product that will introduce users to a handful of potential matches.
The app, which will launch in September as invite-only, already has over 7,000 members on the waitlist, per Mullaji. She secured a $1 million angel investment from Lightspeed's Jeremy Lieu.
Sitch isn't the only AI-powered dating coach platform to gain the attention of prominent VCs.
Amori, founded by Alex Weitzman, is backed by Daybreak Ventures' Rex Woodbury (the size of the investment has not been disclosed).
Weitzman went viral on TikTok in 2023 for a website she built where people could upload texts between themselves and their ex, analyze them using AI, and, as Weitzman put it, "figure out what's wrong with you." The cheeky website inspired the idea of a broader AI-powered dating coach.
Courtesy of Alex Weitzman
Users sign up and fill out a questionnaire about their dating profiles, gender, identity, preferences, and dating goals to give the AI bots more context. The app has several dating coaches with distinct characteristics, like Tabitha, the "wise aunt," or Ethan, "the wingman."
