EUROPEANCEO – Oct 11 – On a professional level, LinkedIn has held the monopoly on networking for some years. "LinkedIn is a platform to find a job or to just maintain your résumé online. It's very conventional and very hard to connect with new people in real life through LinkedIn… that's why we decided to create Shapr, which is a link between dating and professional networking," said Ludovic Huraux, a French entrepreneur who had previously built dating site Attractive World. Shapr has 1.5M in the US, UK and France. It uses swiping, and connections are suggested based on the user's interests and location. Shapr users are limited to 10 – 15 matches per day, which Huraux says helps users to form more meaningful relationships and discourages mindless swiping. Shapr was designed solely for professional networkers, but other dating apps are introducing networking elements such as Bumble. Since the launch of Bumble Bizz, the app sees 17M new matches per week and 64K users joining each day. Bumble itself has hired 11 internal team members through Bumble Bizz.
