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Category: dating apps

Thursday snags $3.5M for a dating app that’s live once a week

by Natasha Lomas

Thursday, a dating app that wants to solve problems created by, well, too much time spent using dating apps, had raised a £2.5 million (~$3.5M) seed investment — a few months after launching (in May) its single-matching service in London and New York (and racking up over 52k downloads).

Last Thursday (June 17) it says that 110,000 likes were sent, resulting in 7,500 matches in a single day. How many actual dates occurred isn’t something it’s able to report, though.

The seed is double their initial target, with financing coming from Ascension Ventures, Best Nights VC (previously M-Venture) the investment arm of Jägermeister, Connect Ventures, plus early backers of CityMapper, TypeForm and FIIT (processed via SeedLegals).

Notable angels backing the dating platform include Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo; Matt Robinson, founder of GoCardless and Nested; Ian Hogarth, founder of Songkick; Eldar Tuvey, founder of Wandera and Henry de Zoute, founder of LookAfterMyBills.

Meme-based dating is here: Meet Schmooze

So what’s Thursday’s twist in a highly competitive space? The clue is in the name: This dating app is only live for one day per week.

Specifically 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 — and “be a bit spontaneous”, as it puts it — if they want to get a date that night.

Profiles are thus fairly basic. Users can upload five photos (either from (Read more...)

Jigsaw scores $3.7M to slow down your dating swipes

by Natasha Lomas

Chalk one up for Jigsaw, an ‘anti-superficial’ dating app, which has scored £2.7 million ($3.7M) in seed funding to put towards US expansion. The round is led by a lead generation company for online dating companies, called The Relationship Corp, with backing from angel investors in the US and UK “primarily” in the tech sector.

As the startup’s name suggests, Jigsaw adds a little cryptic fun to the transactional business of swiping photos of other singles in search of dating chemistry in a bid to offer a less superficial experience.

Albeit their (patented) anti-superficial twist looks a tad gimmicky at first blush: They literally superimpose a digital jigsaw over the faces of users, with pieces removed gradually the more you interact — and the full face only revealed after a pre-set amount of in-app engagement.

Digital filters are also banned, per the app’s FAQ; they only want ‘real’ selfies. So no cute cat ears etc. 

They’ve got a few more tricks up their sleeve but don’t want to offer a public reveal of the planned features we guessed were coming just yet (but, well, a quick glance at the app and it’s basically a half finished jigsaw puzzle of their product roadmap).

The UK startup — which was founded back in 2016 by a couple of friends, Alex Durrant (co-founder and CEO) and Max Adamski (co-founder and CPO), when they were at university (and finding the dating app scene frustratingly superficial, as they tell it, going on (Read more...)