Category: Summer

New L.A. Dating Apps Challenge Swipe Culture With Real-Life Meetups

Posted on November 14, 2024

FROM
LOS ANGELES TIMES – With younger daters losing interest in traditional swipe-based apps, new Los Angeles startups like First Round's on Me, Summer, Lox Club, and Feeld are creating alternatives focused on in-person interactions and community-based dating. These apps move away from endless swiping, instead encouraging real-life meetups and targeting niche communities. While large platforms like Tinder and Bumble still lead the market, their slowed growth has allowed smaller apps to attract users looking for fresh dating experiences.

by Caroline Petrow-Cohen
See full article at Los Angeles Times

See the top news on FROM                 See the top news on Summer
See the top news on Lox Club            See the top news on Feeld

9count, Maker of Wink and Dating App Summer, Raises $27.5M

Posted on August 24, 2022

9count logoTECH CRUNCH – Alex Hofmann once served as Musical.ly's president, overseeing the North and South American markets for the TikTok precursor, then leaving shortly after the app exited to Chinese tech giant ByteDance in 2017. He launched 9count, the maker of the popular friend-finder Wink, mobile dating app Summer (previously Spark), and others. 9count is raising $27.5M in new funding which is an extension of 9count's earlier Series A and includes only its existing investors. 9count's backers were impressed with the metrics coming out of Summer, which launched as Spark back in May but later rebranded. The dating app targets a younger demographic, ages 18 and up. But unlike traditional swipe-based dating apps, Summer shows many users at once – an experience meant to more closely mimic the way it feels to walk into a crowded space in real life. Summer has ~300K monthly active users and 500K downloads. Hofmann claims it's the fastest-growing dating app to hit the market since Bumble arrived in 2014. The video chat app Wink has 2M monthly active users, remaining 9count's largest app to date. In total, 9count's app portfolio now reaches ~10M users.

by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch

See the top news on Summer (formerly Spark)

An Early TikTok Exec Launched a Dating App, Spark

Posted on May 3, 2022

Spark iconTECH CRUNCH – A former president at musical.ly (now known as TikTok), Alex Hofmann, helped build an app that could compete with social giants like Meta, YouTube or Snapchat. After ByteDance acquired musical.ly for ~$1B in 2018, Hofmann left the company to become an investor, but he soon decided he wanted to make apps again. He founded 9count, the parent company of apps like Everland, Helpline, Juju and the friendship-making app Wink, which has millions of users. Wink connects people without regard to location. "It was interesting that some of the 18+ users asked us, 'Oh, it would be great if I could look for people in my city,'" Hofmann said. "So that was one of the reasons for launching the dating app Spark." On Spark, users can see people around them all at once in a grid, kind of like on Grindr. But unlike Grindr, they can only receive messages from people if they've both "sparked" each other. Spark has already "soft-launched" in hundreds of countries, climbing to #1 in the iOS app store in Ireland and the Netherlands within a day.

by Amanda Silberling
See full article at Tech Crunch