As start-ups with AI matchmakers pop up, the biggest dating apps are trying to harness the technology to reinvent themselves. Illustration / Olivier Heiligers, The New York Times
Meet your artificial intelligence matchmakers. These AI tools are changing dating apps, so users don’t have to swipe through an endless scroll of profiles.
After swiping aimlessly for years on dating apps like Hinge and Tinder, Emma Inge, a 25-year-old project manager in San Francisco, decided to try something different.
In September, after following an ad to the website of a startup called Known, Inge spent 20 minutes confiding in an artificial intelligence matchmaker. The matchmaker – essentially an AI chatbot – asked her over a phone call what she was looking for in a partner, and she relayed her preferences (athletic) and red flags (codependent).
A week later, a notification popped up on her phone. She had a match, and for a one-time fee of US$25 ($44), she could meet him at a bar.
“With how dating is nowadays, I thought, ‘Oh, well, let’s try it,’” Inge said. “Let’s do it for the plot.”
Her experience is an example of how AI is transforming the dating app industry. As startups with AI matchmakers pop up, the biggest dating apps – Hinge, Tinder, Bumble and Grindr – are trying to harness the technology to reinvent themselves. They are ushering in a new era of online dating in which people pay for a few premium AI matches a week, instead of subscribing to an endless stream of profiles.
“AI is already playing a big role in our business, but I think it has the potential to be a step change – the next technological shift,” Hesam Hosseini, chief operating officer of Match Group, which owns Hinge and Tinder, said in an interview.
The change could not come at a better time for dating apps, many of which have been struggling. Most of the apps have let users create free accounts with the option to pay for perks like unlimited swipes. But satisfaction with the apps has sunk and so has the number of people willing to pay for them. (Most subscriptions cost around US$30 a month.)
Over the last year, Bumble lost 9% of its paid subscribers, while Match Group lost 5%, even as both grew their total number of users. While paying subscribers are a tiny slice of users, they generate a large portion of profits. The 20% of Match Group users that pay for features and subscriptions account for 97% of revenue.
Match Group’s shares have plunged 80% from their 2021 high, while Bumble’s stock is down 90% from its initial public offering that year. The two companies account for the majority of the dating app market.
The dating apps have run into a hurdle the industry calls “the cycle of despair”. That’s when people download a dating app, get burned out from swiping or getting “ghosted,” and then delete it, only to re-download it months later.
A shift towards AI matchmakers, Hosseini said, would be reminiscent of the early days of online dating when websites like eHarmony asked users 80 questions about themselves to create a profile.
While many startups offer AI matchmakers, the larger apps are just beginning to unveil their own versions. Tinder is testing an AI matching service called Chemistry, which it plans to expand this month. Users would be able to give the app access to their camera roll, which the AI would scan to learn more about them. The service would initially be free, though Tinder could begin charging for it later.
Grindr, a dating app for gay men, has also unveiled six AI features that it calls gAI (pronounced gay-eye). They include an AI “wingman” that gives advice about conversations, an AI tool that can reintroduce old matches and AI-generated summaries of people’s profiles. Grindr plans to bundle the most popular features in a premium subscription tier, said George Arison, the CEO.
Hinge, with around 15 million users, uses an AI tool to give people feedback on their profiles. This year, the company reprogrammed its matching algorithm with generative AI to better learn about user preferences, which has raised the number of matches by 15%, Hosseini said.
Bumble said it planned to release an AI matchmaking app by the end of the year, adding that it hadn’t finalised a business model yet but might charge per match.
The major dating app companies are internally testing other AI tools that may never be released, including dating coaches that can provide feedback and advice after each date and AI clones that can date each other and report the findings to their human makers. Facebook Dating, the dating service in the Facebook app, recently introduced an AI feature that lets users describe their ideal match – brunette, works in tech, lives in New York City – to connect them with real people who fit that description.
But the companies are also wrestling with a growing resistance to AI “slop” and unwanted automation. Hinge, for instance, does not brand its AI features as AI.
Many of the changes have come under new leadership. Last winter, Match Group hired Spencer Rascoff, a co-founder of Zillow, as its CEO. He promptly reorganised the company and personally oversees Tinder. Whitney Wolfe Herd, who founded Bumble in 2014 and left the company in 2024, returned as CEO in March.
“This is not a fad,” Wolfe Herd said of AI dating at a tech conference last year. “We’re going to lean in fast and furiously.”
As dating app companies grapple with the changes, some investors see opportunity. Among other moves, Francisco Partners and Permira, two private equity firms, have reached out to dating apps including Bumble and Grindr about buying them, two people with knowledge of the matter said. They indicated that they wanted to build a portfolio of around six apps to rival Match Group, the people said.
Francisco Partners and Permira declined to comment.
Known, the startup with the AI matchmaker, was founded in May by Celeste Amadon, 22, and Asher Allen, 21, who dropped out of Stanford to start the company. They and a group of psychologists came up with the AI matchmaker’s questions.
Paying per date rather than a monthly subscription was “more incentivising to actually get people out in the real world and on dates,” Amadon said, adding that Known has hosted 10 singles nights in San Francisco with more than 200 attendees each.
Inge, the project manager in San Francisco, said she had signed up for Hinge and Tinder in college but rarely found meaningful connections. She was now “generally anti-dating app,” she said, and has tried meeting people in the wild. She even signed up for a 6am running club to socialise, which did not work. That led her to try Known.
For her blind AI-produced date last month, Inge said, she went to a San Francisco bar and was pleasantly surprised by the encounter. She and her date talked for two hours, bonding over a shared interest in public transportation and new restaurants. He worked for a robot taxi company, and was “the type of guy to sign up for an AI matchmaker,” she said.
They exchanged numbers to arrange a second date – which never happened. Inge said she was ghosted.
“That was the kick of it, that the AI actually did find compatibility,” she said. “It was the human part that didn’t work out.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eli Tan
Photographs by: Olivier Heiligers
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