Month: June 2021
Founder Interview: Dating App Thursday Lands £2.5M
VERDICT.CO.UK – June 30 – Thursday, the dating app backed by Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, has just topped up its coffers with a £2.5M round. "He is going to be a fairly key stakeholder with us," says Matt McNeill Love, co-founder and COO at Thursday, tells Verdict. McNeill Love is unwilling to reveal what Thursday's valuation is following the dating app's latest cash injection. "I'm afraid our chairman's advisors wouldn't be too happy with us saying," McNeill Love protests. "But I can give you a steer: it's over £10M by quite a bit." Thursday's latest funding was backed by Ascension Ventures, Jägermeister's venture arm Best Nights VC, Connect Ventures, TypeForm and FIIT. The Thursday dating app is only available on Thursdays. Users can only search for, match and chat with would-be paramours for 24 hours on the fourth day of the week. Then the magic disappears at the stroke of midnight, with no chats or matches to be saved. The founders believe this encourages serious singles to set up dates directly and cut through plenty of time-wasting waffle.
Canadian Relationship App Couply Won Collision 2021 Pitch Competition
BUSINESS INSIDER – June 30 – The Canadian relationship app Couply won the 2021 pitch competition hosted by Collision, a Toronto-based technology conference attended by thousands of industry giants. Founded by Tim Johnson and Denesh Raymond, Couply is a free relationship app designed to inspire couples to deepen their connection with fun features like personality quizzes, which then help aid the process of planning dates that are mutually enjoyable. Since its launch in December of 2020, Couply has grown from a few downloads a day to 1K downloads a week, with its daily download rate doubling each month as a result of word of mouth.
Announcing LTR Edition 9
OPW – June 30 – LTR stands for Love, Technology, Relationships. Think of it as an online TED for leaders of Internet dating companies and online social communities. This is where we meet, learn, and share.
LTR Edition 9 is on Wed 7th July starting 11:30am EST (New York) and this month we're focused on gamification and DNA-based matching. We have a half hour of networking on virtual tables, three world-class speakers for 20 mins each plus a few mins Q&A, and then a final half hour of networking. 2.5 hours all-in.
If you hold a full time leadership role at an Internet dating company then you are welcome to join IDEA for free, and welcome to join LTR events for free. See the LTR Edition 9 overview, speakers and invite page here. Email mark@courtlandbrooks.com to RSVP for LTR. There are 80 places only.
LTR is kindly sponsored by RealMe, vPaaS by Meet Group, Real Gifts, and Courtland Brooks
Momo to Change Its Name to Hello Group
PR NEWSWIRE – June 28 – Momo, a leading mobile social and entertainment platform in China, will hold an Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders on August 2, 2021. The purpose of the EGM is for the Company's shareholders to approve the change of the company's legal name from "Momo Inc." to "Hello Group Inc."
The Start of the Post-Tinder Era
THE GUARDIAN – June 29 – Women are at the forefront of developing new dating tech. Following on the heels of Whitney Wolfe Herd there are others trying to build more female-friendly platforms. Clementine Lalande, 37, launched Pickable in 2018 for women who wanted more discretion. Women don't need to upload a photo or give their name, so they can browse men's profiles anonymously. In 2015, along with a friend, Lalande also helped create the "slow dating" app Once, which delivers one match a day. The app has 10M users. "Online dating is a market designed by men for men and is governed in a non-transparent way," says Paris-based Lalande, CEO of the Once Dating Group. Jessica and Louella Alderson set up So Syncd in January 2021 after raising ~$1M (£700,000) through a combination of venture capital, an investment club, angel investors and family. The app matches couples based on the Myers-Briggs personality test. One of the first employees at Plenty Of Fish, Kim Kaplan shifted to angel investing before setting up video dating app Snack in Sep 2020. The app, whose engineering team comprises 43% women, aims to combine the matching algorithms of dating platforms like Tinder with streaming platforms such as TikTok.
by Tina Walsh
See full article at The Guardian
See the top news on Once See the top news on So Syncd
See the top news on Pickable See the top news on Snack
Illicit Encounters Uses Matt Hancock’s Image on Billboard Advertising Extramarital Affairs
Match Group Releases First Impact Report
PR NEWSWIRE – June 28 – Match Group released its inaugural Impact Report, which highlights the company's social, environmental, and governance performance for 2020. The report can be viewed and downloaded at mtch.com/impact.
Carsten Böltz – Building a Global Group of Online Matchmaking Brands
LTR – June 28 – Carsten Böltz, CEO of Online Personals Group, has learned a great deal about building global dating brands over nearly two decades in the industry. Leveraging the lessons learned while developing Be2, Academic Singles, C-Date, and Singles50, Böltz has devised a clear strategy for success: data and psychodrama. Data analysis provides crucial information about a service and a platform. However, qualitative analysis is needed to truly understand the behaviors, motivators, and deep needs of users. Online Personals Group works with K&A Brand Research to conduct psychodrama studies on groups of 8 to 12 users to identify their underlying needs, emotions, opinions, and barriers. The intelligence gathered from the research is translated into product design. Carsten Boltz discusses branding, payment strategy, anti-fraud technology, and qualitative research in the latest video in the LTR Conference series.
LTR stands for Love, Technology, Relationships and the online conference covers the Internet dating and Online Social Communities space. It is for members of IDEA and OSCA.
The April LTR was kindly sponsored by RealMe, vPaaS by The Meet Group, Real Gifts & Courtland Brooks.
Dating App Thursday Raises $3.5M
TECH CRUNCH – June 28 – Thursday, a dating app that only works on Thursdays, has raised a £2.5M (~$3.5M) seed investment, a few months after launching in May in London and New York. Last Thursday (June 17) it says that 110K likes were sent, resulting in 7,500 matches in a single day. The app opens for usage at 00.01 each Thursday morning so swiping is compressed into a few hours. All matches and conversations vanish at midnight. Hence users are pushed to act quickly. Matches are also limited to x10 people a day. The plan for the seed funding includes hiring a head of growth and a head of marketing, in addition to other senior roles and a number of tech hires – and coming up with what they dub as a "six figure marketing strategy".
by Natasha Lomas
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com