THE GUARDIAN – Nov 5 – SingleMuslim.com is one of the biggest dating sites in the world that claims ~50k marriages. The site's founder Adeem Younis was a design student at Wakefield College in Yorkshire with a passion for IT. He started SingleMuslim.com 17 years ago. "It was at a time when a lot of forced arranged marriages were happening and it was causing a huge amount of tension and turmoil," he says. The company's headquarters is spread over three floors of a grand Victorian civic building opposite Wakefield town hall. It has a staff of more than 30. Younis has established other ventures. Most notable is the humanitarian charity Penny Appeal, which last year raised ~£14M, mostly from members of the marriage site, and now operates in disaster relief efforts, from Grenfell Tower to Haiti. SingleMuslim.com subscribers pay £30 a month (or £120 for a year) and much of that money is invested in making the platform a safe space. ~10% of members join as a family. In those cases, traditionally the mums or the grannies use the site to do the matchmaking. SingleMuslim.com has a growing membership in the US and Canada, the next push is into India and Pakistan.
