Hinge wants to be Match.com for mobile. You can find horny strangers nearby on Tinder, but Hinge uses its “romance graph” to pair you with friends of friends that fit your style. And now Hinge has a raised $4 million Series A from Great Oaks, Social + Capital, and more to bring its relationships app beyond DC, New York, and Boston. You're still swiping yes or no, but to find your soulmate.
Tinder's success has brought a swell of clones to the seas of mobile dating. But Hinge founder Justin McLeod believes romance comes in many forms, and there's plenty of room for his app. In fact, he sees people using both Tinder and Hinge, but with distinct intentions.
McLeod explains “When we ask our users, they say the use them differently. ‘I use Tinder when I'm out and about or bored or want to fuck around, and Hinge is where I meet the people I want to date.”
“We're the next generation of dating sites” McLeod says, likening Hinge to Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid but mobile-first. Just like those desktop giants, Hinge uses a matching algorithm to intelligently show people mates they're likely to be compatible with.
For example, Hinge pulls your Facebook information to present you with people who went to the same kind of college (ivy league, state school), or similar type of job (tech, finance, politics). But it also goes deeper and connects people across these boundaries if it notices female lawyers dig male bankers, or that Harvard guys seem to hit it off with Boston University girls.
This "Romance Graph" as I call it, gives Hinge an incredible success rate and therefore a stunning retention rate. Since expanding beyond its home city of DC in August to New York and Boston, Hinge has doubled its user count to 60,000 yet maintained its stickiness. McLeod says it still see about 85% of people who download Hinge as active a week later, and 75% a month later.
Those metrics helped it score this new $4 million Series A led by Great Oaks and joined The Social+Capital Partnership, Red Swan, 500 Startups, StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr, former Facebook Director of Business Development David Fisch, Graph Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Fortify VC, Middleland Capital, Militello Capital, former Facebook engineering lead Prashant Malik, founder of DC coworking space 1776 Evan Burfield, and one of the founders of LivingSocial.
That money will help Hinge break into new cities, and revamp its iOS and Android apps. McLeod concludes “Dating sites used to take the old newspaper classified models and put it online. We're taking the really old model of meeting through friends and modernizing it for mobile.”
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