Dating App Snack Sets Up Gen Z Investor Fund

Dating app Snack has announced it is looking for young Gen Z investors with the launch of its new Gen Z Syndicate on AngelList. 

According to Tech Crunch, this move opens funding to Gen Z community members, the app’s target audience. The company hopes to attract influencers, creatives, and young entrepreneurs to participate in the company’s $2 million ask alongside angel investors and other funding sources, giving them a stake in the app.

Snack is setting this up as a SAFE (small investment future equity), which means its offering is based on future growth, and the company is allocating a certain amount to create its own Gen Z syndicate.

Snack has already reached out to some big names, such as Gen Z Mafia, a group of technologists who work to make capital and start-ups more inclusive and who will act as consultants for the app. Other investors joining the SAFE are Samuel Natbony, tech investor and founder of The Innovation Army, Monique Woodard of Cake Ventures, SHAKTI, Backbone Angels, and Christian Winklund who headed dating app SKOUT, which was sold to Meet Group.

This move follows the dating app’s initial seed funding of $3.5 million, announced in February of this year.

Snack was founded by former Plenty of Fish executive Kim Kaplan, who designed the dating app to be styled like TikTok, with videos replacing profiles in a feed its users could scroll through. This type of content is more attractive to younger daters, who are looking for video content to engage them on apps. When two people like each other’s videos, they are matched.

Snack is already capitalizing on its TikTok-like platform. It will be one of the first apps to use TikTok’s login SDK for third-party apps, which means Snack users can share their TikTok videos to their accounts instead of having to create brand new content for Snack.

Kaplan explains to Tech Crunch that Tinder and Bumble “were the first apps to come out and design and build with mobile in mind versus the rest of us which were desktop, trying to cram everything into a mobile phone.”

“I think that combination of TikTok being the new distribution channel is going to be a massive opportunity — and that’s what we’re trying to leverage,” she said.

Nicholas Huebecker of Gen Z Mafia told Tech Crunch that he was interested in Snack for its new approach to dating apps. “Video-first dating allows a unique sense of expression that you can’t portray with a few well-crafted words and filtered pictures,” he said.