FOX BUSINESS – Apr 16 – DateMySchool is a dating site that targets students. The site now has ~200K users. The company is not yet profitable but it has received ~$3M in funding. Every user is verified upon sign up, alumni and students alike. DMS determines who can access your profile.
by Christina Scotti
The full article was originally published at Fox Business, but is no longer available.
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OPW – Mar 29 – This is the most interesting idating startup I’ve seen in a while. Coffee Meets Bagel has raised $650k. They send a daily match that they call a ‘bagel.’ Users have 24 hours to accept or reject. If they both accept they are connected via phone or SMS. Simple! They’re introducing a virtual currency credit based system called ‘beans.’ People can spend beans in various ways, for example they can pay 65 beans to see what friends they have in common with a particular match. Oh yeah, and they have a partnership with Starbucks.
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 28 – Sonar, a social discovery service that was among the top apps at last year’s SXSW in Austin, is announcing new investment from Bing Fund. This angel fund and incubator program from Microsoft was publicly revealed this summer, allowing Microsoft to partner with entrepreneurs, which can then receive subsidies to use Bing APIs in their apps, as well as access the technologies developed by Microsoft Research. Sonar’s app uses check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare, plus geo-tagged tweets, to show you lists of nearby people, ranking them first by friends you know, then showing you other relevant people nearby.
by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch and InternetDatingInvestments.
PRESS RELEASE – Feb 11 – With 1.4M viewers every week, Dragon’s Den, which airs on CBC, includes 5 high profile investors from various industries, all 5 of whom were interested in investing in TwoMangoes.com. All investors unanimously agreed to invest $500,000 at 30% equal parts. After consulting with the rest of the team and their investor, the TwoMangoes team decided to turn down the money, based on the high percentage of ownership that came along with the deal. "We’re in a good position with our business right now so it would have to be the right kind of partner and valuation,” said co-founder Rahul Bhardwaj. TwoMangoes.com is a worldwide South Asian online dating site with a North American site that caters to English speaking South Asians and an Indian site that caters specifically to India.
PR WEB – Jan 18 – People Discovery site theComplete.me raised $500K in financing from Western Technology Investment and relaunched as LikeIt.com. Similar to Facebook’s new Graph Search beta product, LikeIt enables social people discovery, helping users connect to others who are talking about the things they like and share their attitudes. The LikeIt social graph, already ~20M people strong, expands people search beyond the Facebook network, allowing users to easily aggregate interests and activities from eight other social networks.
The full article was originally published at SF Gate, but is no longer available.
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
GEEKWIRE – Jan 16 – LikeBright, the online dating site that taps into the power of social networks to find one’s perfect match, has received funding from the Bing Fund, the newly-formed investment vehicle of Microsoft’s search engine. “Most single people meet their partners through friends, and lots of people like to set their friends up,” said founder Nick Soman. “We give them a simple, social and safe way to do this online." Soman declined to disclose the size of the investment from the Bing Fund. LikeBright previously raised $650,000.
by John Cook
See full article at Geekwire
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GROWING BUSINESS – Dec 17 – London-based dating site DoingSomething has raised a six figure investment through the Highgate EIS Tech Fund. Launched in 2011, DoingSomething promotes local interesting things to do on a date, such as ping pong or bike riding.
by Abigail Van-West
The full article was originally published at Growing Business, but is no longer available.
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TECH CRUNCH – Nov 28 – At The Pool, a social discovery network that aims to be the anti-Facebook, has emerged from beta and is in the process of closing a $1M seed financing round led by Clearstone Venture Partners. In addition, the startup is adding some localization support for its growing international user base. At The Pool users sign up for groups (or “pools”) based on their background, interests and the type of people they’re interested in meeting. At The Pool then provides the matches.
TECH IN ASIA – Oct 24 – The Beijing-based startup behind the flirty hook-up app Momo is preparing to take it international, with an English version of its iPhone app submitted to Apple last week. The dating app has been picking up users at an incredible rate; it was 500K last December, 2M by this March, and 10M by August, and now 16M users. ~10% are international users. Momo attracted $40M in series B funding this summer.
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 26 - Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating site that provides one match per day, every day at noon. The startup is now announcing $600K funding, led by Lightbank and including Match.com co-founder Peng T. Ong. It will be used to help Coffee Meets Bagel expand to San Francisco, where the startup recently moved its offices. The site is growing 50% month-over-month, setting up ~100K introductions which have resulted in 6K actual direct connections. 70% of users actively checking the service for matches every day. Coffee Meets Bagel is free, but it also uses a freemium model based around virtual credits to unlock the identity of mutual friends users share on Facebook.
by Darrell Etherington
See full article at Tech Crunch
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This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.