TECHWEEZ – Mar 29 – The service is set to launch in Kenya in 2 days. Coffee Meets Bagel launched in 2013. Rather than swiping through matches, Coffee Meets Bagel promised its users one potential match a day. If both users liked each other, the app would then connect them in a text conversation.
by Eric Wainaina
See full article at Techweez
TECH CRUNCH – Mar 14 – There will be a digital dating panel at Disrupt New York this May. Bumble CEO & Founder Whitney Wolfe, Her founder & CEO Robyn Exton, and Coffee Meets Bagel co-founder and COO Dawoon Kang will discuss how niche dating services could be the next big thing.
by Jordan Crook
See full article at Tech Crunch
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TECH CRUNCH – Feb 11 – From now on, users can A/B test photos, by uploading two options and letting other users vote on which is best. Coffee Meets Bagel has been polling daters and found that 54% of the time people pass on "bagels," the reason is photo-related.
by Katie Roof
See full article at Tech Crunch
POETS AND QUANTS – Feb 10 – Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating site that delivers one match to users, a bagel, every day at noon. Members can then like or pass on their bagels. The founders are a trio of sisters. One holds an MBA from Stanford, another one the Harvard MBA. One-by-one, the sisters quit their full-time jobs to develop the site. They launched in 2012, and within a year generated $87K profit. By the end of 2014, profits had risen to ~$1M.
In Sep 2012, the sisters raised a $600K. In May 2014, they raised $2.8M and a year ago a $7.8M Series A. Despite a sizable Q4 drop, at $128B in venture investments, 2015 was the highest year in US venture since 2000. "We love investing in smart MBAs," says Adam Rothenberg, a managing partner at NY City boutique angel investment fund, BoxGroup. The MBA seems to be trending in value in a space once dominated by computer scientists and engineers.
by Nathan Allen
See full article at Poets and Quants
BUZZFEED – Jan 14 – Even when users say "no preference" for ethnicity, CoffeeMeetsBagel dating app tends to show them people of their own race. CoffeeMeetsBagel commented: "If you are a member of a minority group, 'no preference' may end up meaning you'll be matched with people from your own race." Yet, it seems like a relatively common experience, even if users aren't from a minority group. White and Asian women who had no preference were shown mostly Asian men; Latino men were shown only Latina women. Coffee Meets Bagel argues that they actually are hoping for racial matches, even if they don't know it.
by Katie Notopoulos
See full article at BuzzFeed
TECH CRUNCH – Dec 22 – Coffee Meets Bagel launched "Send A Woo", a feature similar to Tinder's Super Like. With "Send A Woo", Coffee Meets Bagel's users can express higher-than-usual interest in a potential match. CMB launched in 2013. The app delivers one match per day. Users then have 24 hours to respond. If both users liked each other, the app would then connect them in a text conversation.
by Jordan Crook
See full article at Tech Crunch
TECH CRUNCH – Nov 26 – Bullish is a new TechCrunch talk show. Their first guest was Arum Kang, the founder of Coffee Meets Bagel. She talked about how online dating has lost its stigma. "Online dating will be mobile only; that's where the trend is going", she also said." Watch the full interview.
by Alex Wilhelm
See full article at Tech Crunch
NYMAG – Oct 6 – Users choose dating apps the same way they choose bars – based on the people. The make-or-break factor in whether users stick around, is the crowd. With new apps getting launched every few months, the dating app people will like best is the one that happens to have a user base that fits the demographic of people they want.
Here's a breakdown of some of the dating apps Maureen O'Connor, a sex columnist, have experimented with:
Dating apps, like all social situations, are malleable. They're whatever people want them to be.
FINANCIAL POST – Sep 20 – Three sisters Arum, Dawoon and Soo Kang – graduates of Harvard, Stanford and Parsons School of Design respectively – launched Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating app that has made ~25M connections that have led to ~20K relationships and 200 plus engagements/marriages in the three years since its launch in USA. The app launched in Canada this summer. The app impressed billionaire investor Mark Cuban; he offered them $30M for the business, which has yet to make a profit, when the sisters appeared on Shark Tank this past January. They turned him down. After that, they raised $7.8M in a series A round led by DCM Capital. With no profits to point to, Kang said investors liked the team, the vision and the engagement metrics. The company targets young, busy working professionals between the ages of 21 and 35, which is exactly why the Kangs decided to expand into Canada. The business is based on a freemium model. Users can pay for getting more than one match (bagel) a day or unlocking the identity of a mutual friend.
by Mary Teresa Bitti
See full article at Financial Post
INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR – Aug 14 – When Match bought POF for $575M in July, smaller dating sites felt encouraged. Mark Brooks, an Internet dating business consultant who has worked with POF, says the news prompted one start-up to approach him with a business plan. "They told me they'd like to get purchased by Match in six to nine months," Brooks says of the would-be clients. He had to set them straight, explaining that the POF acquisition was many years in the making. POF had impressive back-end features and 100M users. Bill Pescatello, a partner at Lightbank, a VC firm in Chicago, feels very optimistic about online romance. "It's crazy looking back to see how Tinder and other mobile apps have changed the game," he says. Tinderites may be anywhere from age 18 to 35, the younger set being those not yet interested in marriage prospects and likely to stay with the service for a longer time, notes Brooks. Another popular apps are Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge. Dawoon Kang, CMB co-founder, says she believes her site will grow to rival Match. That kind of confidence made it easy for her to turn down Mark Cuban’s offer to buy the company for $30M.
by Lila MacLellan
See full article at Institutional Investor
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