Dating App Smitten Raises 10 Million in Funding

Smitten, a new dating app designed for Gen Z daters, has raised $10 million in its latest round of Series A funding.

According to Venture Beat, investors of the app include Makers Fund, Possible Ventures, and Wonder Invest.

Smitten has gotten attention, thanks to a new study that found it had a post-match success rate of 60 percent, compared to Tinder’s 11 percent – a huge difference to online daters. It is currently the most popular dating app in Iceland and second most popular in Europe, so the new round of funding is in part to help the app expand into new territories and grow its user base.

Smitten has a new take on matching – in addition to sifting through profiles, it has added games to help young daters interact in more engaging ways. If you are interested in someone’s profile, you can start with a questionnaire game called Guessary, where you can guess how the other person answered a series of yes and no questions and get immediate feedback on whether they are correct. If you like how they answered, you can like and match with them and take it from there.

How to use Smitten

Questions run the gamut, from “have you ever been arrested?” to “do you like pineapple on your pizza?” according to what Smitten Co-Founder and Designer Asgeir Visir told Venture Beat. Another game the app offers is Lie Detector, which is based on Two Truths and a Lie, where your match has to guess which one of the three statements you create to describe yourself is a lie.

The theory behind incorporating games into its dating app is that it helps break the ice without having to struggle to ask questions or think of conversation topics. And to make it more interesting to get to know people.

“Social discovery and gaming is an increasingly interesting intersection, and the team at Smitten have created an amazingly fun experience that truly strikes a chord with young adults,” said Alli Ottarson, the lead for Makers Fund on the deal.

David Simonarson, Smitten co-founder and CEO, said in a press release about the funding: “After years of creating social consumer apps, we fell in love with the online dating space and launched Smitten in 2020. We created personality-based games and fun interactive profiles to make it easy for strangers to form meaningful connections. Seeing how much our users love Smitten, we believe we can become the leading player in online dating for Generation Z.”

To find out more about this new dating app you can check out the Smitten website.