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.
Category: All Investment Raises
Coffee Meets Bagel Lands $600K From Lightbank, Match.com Co-Founder
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
See all posts on CoffeeMeetsBagel
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
HotOrNot Founder Launches Social Discovery Service
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 18 – Perceptual Networks has raised $1M in funding from an impressive group of VCs and angels. The startup appears to be focused on social discovery and mobile. It was co-founded by HotOrNot and I/O Ventures founder Jim Young, is developing a suite of products to make it easy for people to find the people they best connect with, whether they are looking for the right co-workers or employees, the right relationship, the right friends and activity partners or the right community to live in. Young founded HotorNot in 2000 and sold the site for $20M in 2008.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
Mark Brooks: HotorNot is a hallmark idating brand, and (was) one of the most efficient dating sites ever built. Badoo acquired HotorNot in April from Avid Life Media who acquired HotorNot from founders Jim and James in Feb 2008.
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
Chinese Meetup App Momo Says Hello To $40M
VENTURE BEAT – Aug 28 – Momo Tech has raised $40M for its app that helps nearby strangers connect with each other. The product is similar to Grindr, Skout, Blendr and Badoo. Momo claims 10M users (acquired in just 1 year), 2.2 million of whom use the app daily, and the addition of 1M users a month. Momo means “Hi, stranger” in Mandarin.
by Rebecca Grant
See full article at Venture Beat
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Tagged Raises $15M
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 22 – Tagged, a social network for meeting new people, has raised $15M in growth capital financing from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank. The company previously raised $9M in funding. Tagged was on an acquisition tear in 2011, buying hi5, Digsby, TopicMarks and WeGame. Tagged's revenue grew by 35% to~ $43M in 2011.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
2LoveToday Receives $250,000 Funding
PR WEB – June 19 – ndArtemis Technologies invested $250K into of 2LoveToda, a dating service powered by matchmaker Janis Spindel. The funds will be used to develop a transition from traditional matchmaking to free online dating & matchmaking through a Private Registry.
See full article at Digital Journal
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
IvyDate Raised $1.5 Million
BUSINESS INSIDER – June 1 – Beri Meric and Phillipp Triebel, cofounders of IvyDate, raised $1.5M in funding from a bunch of angel investors, including some un-named investors that have put money into Spotify, Uber, and Facebook. IvyDate is an exclusive online dating club with an admissions committee that decides who can and who can't be part of the community. 30K people have so far been given the nod.
by Marcus Moretti
See full article at Business Insider
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
$1.22 Million Funding For TheComplete.me
TECH CRUNCH – Apr 16 – TheComplete.me launched a Facebook app in March that pulls in and analyzes data from Facebook and other social sites to figure out who you might be a good fit with. Led by Brian Bowman, the former VP of product at Match.com, it’s also announcing $1.22M seed round from Intel Capital, psuedo-rival dating site PlentyofFish, the CrunchFund, and a list of prominent angels. The app goes further than Facebook, too. Once you’re logged in, you can also connect with LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Photobucket, Flickr, Foursquare, GoodReads, and Instagram. It then pulls in unique data about you from each service to figure out even richer matches. In private beta testing so far, it has amassed ~1.5M profiles of users and their friends, which is already helping to shape recommendations. At the same time, theComplete.me preserves anonymity. Users only see each others first names initially, and nothing gets posted to Facebook for others to see (unless you manually enable it to do that).
by Eric Eldon
See full article at Tech Crunch
See all posts on theComplete.me
See all posts on POF.com
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Skout: From Deadpool’s Door To $22M Funding
TECH CRUNCH – Apr 3 – Eighteen months ago Christian Wiklund’s company Skout was down to three people after burning much of the $4.6M it had raised since being founded in 2007. Wiklund and his co-founder Niklas Lindstrom put their heads down. They changed the app to focus on young people who wanted to meet strangers and singles who wanted to flirt. Skout’s new app came at a very lucky time in the market. The app supports ~300M messages per month and it’s signing up ~1M users per month. So on the back of this turnaround, Skout is raising $22M in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. With the funding, Skout plans to find a new office that will hold 120 people.
by Kim-Mai Cutler
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Kingfish Labs Raises $500,000 To Turn Facebook Profiles Into Dating Profiles
BUSINESS INSIDER – Mar 27 – There are a lot of dating sites and many of them pull in Facebook data. Yoke is Kingfish Lab's first Facebook app. Kingfish Labs is a new company that raised $500K from Lerer Ventures and Softbank Capital to crunch Facebook data and create recommendation apps. Kingfish Labs was founded by Fishman and a fellow Huffington Post employee, Jeff Revesz. Rob Fishman served as Huffington Post's social media editor. Jeff Revesz joined the company in 2010 when his startup, Adaptive Semantics, was acquired. There they met Ken Lerer, Huffington Post's co-founder and an investor in Kingfish Labs. When a user signs up for Yoke, they can say if they're single or in a relationship. If they're in a relationship, they become a matchmaker and can introduce single friends to each other. If they're single, they can send a Yoke or Facebook message to a friend for an introduction to the second degree person.
by Alyson Shontell
See full article at SF Gate
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.