Design

Actor Rebel Wilson has announced the launch of her new dating app Fluid, designed to help daters find relationships that are about “love with no labels.”

The dating app allows users to set up their profiles without having to identify the gender or sexual preference of their potential partners, or to define themselves by a limited number of categories. According to Wilson, the app’s algorithm factors in the profiles you are spending more time on and serves up other profiles based on those, rather than filtering out potential matches according to sexual and gender preferences, allowing singles more opportunities to explore different types of relationships.

“This is the first dating app where you don’t have to actually define yourself or tick a box to say ‘I’m straight, I’m gay, I’m bisexual,’ and you don’t have to describe what you are looking for,” the Pitch Perfect star told People Magazine.

Meet Muse Media, the parent company of dating app Snack, a video-based app designed to attract young Gen Z daters, has been sued by a thirty-seven-year-old man for age discrimination.

The plaintiff Geoffrey Taylor argued that he tried to sign up for the app but was denied due to the company’s policy of only allowing singles 35 and under on its app. He received a message referring him to try Tinder or Match, with a message that read: "100% of snack are under 35" and "looks like you're past our sell-by date."

According to Courthouse News, Taylor filed the lawsuit against the Canadian-based company in San Diego citing it violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers based on their race, sex, religion and other protected categories. He’s seeking $4,000 in damages per violation and hopes to force Snack to loosen their rules on who can join. His lawsuit demands a jury trial and requests injunctive relief as well.

Dating app Hinge is targeting Gen Z daters with new video and polling features which are popular tools on social media apps.

Video Prompts and Prompt Polls help users strike up conversations in a more organic and playful way. Gen Z daters are looking for something more engaging than swiping, so Hinge and other dating apps are turning to game-like and video features to entertain and draw them in.

A video feature already exists in the Hinge app, but with Video Prompts, users are limited to recording within the app instead of posting something from their camera rolls, making for a more spontaneous and less polished introduction. Hinge says that this “encourages a filterless and authentic interaction between users,” according to Tech Crunch.

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.

Dating app conglomerate 9Count announced that it has raised another $6 million in VC funding on top of its earlier Series A funding of $21.5 million, bringing total funds raised so far to $27.5 million.

According to Tech Crunch, investors have taken notice of the company’s dating app Summer, a rebranding of former dating app Spark, which has gained traction in a saturated market namely for its appeal to younger daters.

Summer hit number one in the App Store in two markets immediately after its launch and now has more than 500,000 downloads, over a million registered users, and more than 300,000 monthly active users (just a few months later). 9Count CEO Alex Hofman told Tech Crunch that it’s “the fastest-growing dating app to hit the market since Bumble arrived in 2014.”

Dating app Bumble wants to extend its platform beyond dating and into social networking and virtual friendships through a new community feature – now dubbed “Hive.”

Hive is currently being tested, the company revealed in a recent earnings call with investors. While the company’s revenue projections have been lowered through the end of the year in part due to the app being pulled from Russia and the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is moving ahead on development projects.

Social networking has become an important part of Bumble’s growth strategy. Hive is in essence a revamping of its Bumble BFF friend-finding feature, and will offer things like group chat, polls and video calls to help people better connect over the app, according to Tech Crunch. The article pointed out that Hive focuses on helping people find “platonic connections through small communities.” In other words, Bumble is focusing on making the feature community-driven where people can drop in and out of conversations depending on their shared interests.