Move over Hinge and Tinder, there’s a new crop of dating apps. Meet the founders behind 11 startups sparking romance.

Founders like Elle Wilson of Met Through Friends, Nandini Mullaji of Sitch, and Anushka Joshi of Friend of a Friend are disrupting dating with new startups.

The pitchforks are out and sharper than ever for the major dating apps.

Singles fatigued by major players like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are declaring themselves celibate or simply turning back to their exes. Just this year, nearly 80% of Americans surveyed by Forbes said they felt fatigued by dating apps.

It’s created chaos for the swipe-built businesses. Bumble’s stock has dropped over 50% this year as the company rethinks its women-message-first model. Meanwhile, Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, was sued this year over claims that it made its apps addictive, though Match Group has denied the claims.

Some see this as an opportunity. Startup founders around the world have sensed that the dating industry is ripe for disruption.

Joshi’s dating app, Friend of a Friend, has ads plastered around New York City.

In New York City, two healthcare workers who’d never started a business dove headfirst into reimagining the double date. In Paris, a woman who worked for Microsoft leveraged decades of experience in tech to create a digital map of missed connections. On Instagram, the influencer Serena Kerrigan took matters into her own hands by letting followers shoot their shots in a mass group chat.

“I want to scare the shit out of Hinge and Bumble — all of them,” Kerrigan, who has about 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, said. “I want to really disrupt the space.”

Investors are also paying attention. Rex Woodbury, the founder of Daybreak Ventures, told B-17 last month that internet-dating companies were “very disruptable in this moment.”

BI spoke with 11 startup founders who believe they have the next great innovation in dating.

The anti-swipers

When setting out to build a dating app, swiping fatigue was top of mind for Vaish Sesetty and Cyrus Belsoi, the founders of the dating app Pique. The two cofounders previously worked at Amazon Web Services and Datadog, respectively.

Vaish Sesetty and Cyrus Belsoi cofounded the dating app Pique.

“We’re trying to get people to actually see people as people here,” Belsoi told BI.

The Pique app gives users up to six matches a day after answering a daily multiple-choice question — and there’s no swiping involved.

In addition to its low-tech app, Pique hosts in-person events in New York City. The founders host speed-dating parties, where people answer a single question before the event begins, and a pop-up in McCarren Park in Brooklyn on weekends, where parkgoers can snap a picture in real time and write out a bio and passersby can inquire about the singles posted on the wall.

Meanwhile, Karima Ben Abdelmalek, a tech professional in France who’s worked at Microsoft and Dailymotion, felt dating apps needed a more social element as far back as 2014.

Abdelmalek created Happn, where users turn on their location and are notified when they’ve bumped into another user while going about their day-to-day lives. The hope is that you meet like-minded singles in the places you already frequent — bars, restaurants, and concerts.

“Singles today are looking to bring back real-life encounters, like going to bars and restaurants,” Abdelmalek told BI. “Our mission today is to bring back people meeting offline.”

While Happn launched nearly a decade ago, the app was ahead of its time in prioritizing in-person connection over swiping and direct messaging.

Other startups, like First Round’s on Me, are prioritizing in-app actions that direct users to set up a date instead of endlessly swiping.

“It’s so easy to swipe — it’s like a game,” First Round’s on Me’s cofounder and CEO, Joe Feminella, said. “It’s like you’re playing Tetris or something, and that’s kind of what dehumanized it for me.”

Joe Feminella is the cofounder and CEO of First Round’s on Me.

First Round’s on Me, which Feminella cofounded with his wife, Hannah, whom he met through Hinge, encourages users to “go on a date” and get out into the world. While the app has a stack of potential matches that users can click through, there’s no swiping.

The company announced earlier this month that it raised $3 million in seed funding, led by Manna Group.

The ‘we met through friends’

Sometimes, the matchmakers are the friends we make along the way.

Elle Wilson, a dating coach and the founder of the New York City-based dating-event series Met Through Friends, was planning dinner parties for her friends in 2022. Like many 20-somethings, Wilson’s friends often complained about the trials and tribulations of dating.

“Yes, things feel really challenging for people who are dating and people who are single and don’t want to be, but I know they know lots of great people,” Wilson said. “What if we got them all in a room together and saw what happened?”

Elle Wilson launched Met Through Friends earlier this year

Wilson’s events, which now bring together about 300 attendees each month, require people to bring a friend with them — a built-in wingman.

Dating with friends is also the premise of Fourplay, which believes the future of dating is double or nothing. Singles make joint profiles with their friends and match with other duos, but the app’s founders, Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs, don’t think a “double date” has to be exclusively about pairing off.

Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs founded Fourplay in 2019.

“There really are no expectations with Fourplay,” Dietzek said. Instead, the founders see Fourplay as an invitation for a friendship, a relationship, or simply a fun night out. The point is to make meeting new people less stressful and less lonely by doing it with a friend.

“They’re doing something together, as opposed to being isolated on their own devices and going at singlehood alone,” Dietzek said.

But sometimes your friends can’t be there on your first date.

Anushka Joshi, the founder of Friend of a Friend, is launching a dating app focused on mutual connections to make dating less daunting.

“Dating is probably one of the biggest decisions or activities that we do in our 20s and beyond,” Joshi said. “My friends and I were just coming up against a lot of problems.”

Everything from post-pandemic awkwardness to dating apps growing into colossal businesses “made it hard for us to date,” Joshi added.

But meeting someone through a friend felt more natural. In fact, it’s how Hinge originally made its pitch to new users in 2014. Feeling that the dating-app market had abandoned this form of connection, Joshi started building Friend of a Friend earlier this year and plans to launch an app in the fall. Users will share their contact-book data with the app to see how many mutual connections they share with other users.

Anushka Joshi founded Friend of a Friend earlier this year.

“Maybe it’s naive or hopeful of me, but I just want people to have an experience on the app where it’s like, ‘I’m really meeting someone that I connect with’ instead of feeling like, ‘Oh, that was just another shitty date, another stranger,'” Joshi said.

The more-than-just-pictures crowd

Derek Lee, a cofounder of the dating app Boo, wants people’s personalities to shine through the small screen.

“When dating moved online, it created a ton of winners and losers,” Lee told BI. He said picture-first profiles have driven users to care more about looks than the potential real-life chemistry they might have.

With his two cofounders, Lee designed Boo to “jailbreak the swiping mode” by allowing users to share memes, art, poetry, and geek out on their interests with other users instead of building a perfectly manicured profile.

David Chang, Derek Lee, and Richard Chang are the cofounders of Boo.

Hashtag “universes,” with topics like #fashion and #outdoors, are central to the Boo experience, allowing users to meet like-minded matches. While Boo users still create profiles and swipe, they see compatible profiles, partially based on an MBTI-like personality quiz they take when they register.

“Instead of just waiting for a swipe back, you can engage, have fun, tell jokes, and share memes,” Lee said. “It is a much more dynamic experience.”

Katya Chernyak, a lawyer in New York City, was likewise disillusioned by the gap between stunning profiles online and lackluster in-person dates.

“I was wasting so much time,” Chernyak told BI. “I wanted an honest platform where you could experience that person right off the bat, which would lead to higher-quality matches.”

Last year, Chernyak followed her frustration out of her legal career and launched the video-profile dating app Fast-Forward Dating App with two cofounders. Users record themselves answering five questions, with prompts like, “What’s expensive but worth it?” and “What would your friends say is your best quality?”

FFWD allows users to record as many takes as they need but bans any edits or filters.

Katya Chernyak, Aeen Avini, and Victoria Todis are the cofounders of FFWD.

After expanding to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, FFWD plans to incorporate an algorithm that understands the nuances of capturing personality on video, like whether users gravitate to responses with more humor or more flowery language.

“We want to draw more rich conclusions about who you are better matched with in real life,” Chernyak said.

The Instagram DMs

One of the biggest dating apps isn’t even a dating app — it’s Instagram.

“Everyone’s online,” Serena Kerrigan said. “They don’t want to be on the dating apps, but a lot of people are OK with a DM slide-in.”

Kerrigan, who used to host an Instagram Live show about dating sponsored by Bumble, recently started using Instagram’s broadcast channel to connect singles. Her community, Let’s Fucking Date, brings nearly 3,000 people together in a one-sided group chat where Kerrigan shares three new singles weekly and encourages her followers to shoot their shot.

Serena Kerrigan runs an Instagram broadcast channel where followers can slide into the DMs of eligible singles each week.

“It normalizes you being able to slide into someone’s DM, which feels more intentional and approachable than a swipe on a Hinge or a Bumble,” Kerrigan said.

Kerrigan also sells a dating-card game with conversation prompts, also called “Let’s Fucking Date.”

The dating coaches

Some dating startups are trying to help people navigate the various stages of dating with coaching.

“There’s this huge gap in the market around, weirdly enough, education,” Nandini Mullaji, a matchmaker and cofounder of the AI-powered dating-coaching app Sitch, said. Mullaji cofounded Sitch with Chad DePue.

Mullaji, who’s happily married, has been setting people up on dates this year by collecting information through a form she’d shared with her Substack, Instagram, and TikTok followers. She told BI that what started as a goal to set up 50 dates snowballed into setting up more than 200 people.

Nandini Mullaji founded Sitch earlier this year.

Mullaji’s building a new app called Sitch to help people navigate the dating process using AI, which she trained to replicate the flow of conversation one would have with a professional matchmaker.

“You can put in screenshots; you can put in your dating-app profile; you can put in other people’s dating-app profiles to figure out what the opening line should be, all of that,” Mullaji said. The app also plans to include a matchmaking product to introduce users to a handful of potential matches.

Mullaji said the app launches next month as invite-only and already has over 7,000 members on its waiting list. She said the app secured a $1 million angel investment round, which included Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed.

Sitch isn’t the only AI-powered dating coach platform to gain the attention of prominent venture capitalists.

Amori, founded by Alex Weitzman, is backed by Rex Woodbury, though the size of the investment hasn’t been disclosed.

Weitzman went viral on TikTok last year for a website she built where people could upload texts between themselves and their ex, analyze them using AI, and, as she put it, “figure out what’s wrong with you.” The cheeky website inspired the idea of a broader AI-powered dating coach.

Alex Weitzman founded Amori last year.

Users sign up and fill out a questionnaire about their dating profiles, gender, identity, preferences, and dating goals to give the AI bots more context. The app has several dating coaches with distinct characteristics, like Tabitha, the “wise aunt,” or Ethan, “the wingman.”

Here’s a recap of the startups disrupting the dating ecosystem:

• Amori is an AI-powered coaching app where users can upload texts or screenshots to get advice about dating.
• Boo is a personality-driven app where users fill out quizzes and join threads based on mutual interests.
• Fourplay allows friends to create joint profiles and match with other duos for “double dates.”
• Fast-Forward Dating App is a video-profile dating app where users answer five questions on camera with no edits or filters.
• First Round’s on Me is a dating app that prioritizes making plans for a date.
• Friend of a Friend is a dating app that connects mutual friends.
• Happn is a location-based app where users meet connections they’ve come across in real life.
• Let’s Fucking Date with SFK is an Instagram Broadcast Channel where a creator shares three new singles each week, and followers can slide into each other’s DMs.
• Met Through Friends is an in-person event series hosted by a dating coach.
• Pique is a dating app where users are prompted with a question of the day and then matched with people who answered similarly.
• Sitch is an AI-powered matchmaking and dating-coach app.