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

In New York City, two healthcare workers who had never started a business are diving 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. And on Instagram, 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,” said Kerrigan, who has about 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. “I want to really disrupt the space.”

Investors, too, are paying attention. Rex Woodbury, the founder of Daybreak Ventures, told BI earlier this summer that internet dating companies were “very disruptable in this moment.”

Business Insider spoke with founders of 11 startups 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 Pique Dating founders Vaish Sesetty and Cyrus Belsoi. The two previously worked at AWS and Datadog, respectively.

FROM, which Feminella cofounded with his wife Hannah (who not-so-ironically met through Hinge), encourages users to “go on a date” and get out into the world. While the app does have a stack of potential matches on its app that users can click through, there is no swipe.

In August, FROM announced it raised $3 million in seed funding from family-run fund Manna Group.

The we-met-through-friends

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

Elle Wilson, dating coach and founder of the NYC-based dating event series Met Through Friends, was planning dinner parties for her friends in 2022. Like many 20-something-year-olds, 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?”

“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 simply 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, 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 and be able to see how many mutual connections they share with other users on the app.

Hashtag “universes,” with topics like #fashion and #outdoors, are central to the Boo experience, where users can meet like-minded matches. Boo users still create profiles and swipe, however, but are shown 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.”

NYC lawyer Katya Chernyak was likewise disillusioned by the gap between stunning profiles online and lackluster in-person dates.

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

In 2023, Chernyak followed her frustration out of her legal career and, along with two cofounders, launched the video-profile dating app FFWD. Looking directly into the camera, users answer five question prompts, like “What’s expensive, but worth it?” and “What would your friends say is your best quality?”

FFWD allows users as many takes as they need, but bans any quick edits or filters.

“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.

In addition to running the Instagram-based dating channel, Kerrigan also sells a dating card game with conversation prompts, also called “Let’s Fucking Date.”

The dating coaches

Beyond finding a new match, 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,” said Nandini Mullaji, matchmaker and founder of AI-powered dating coaching app Sitch.

Mullaji, who herself is happily married, has been setting people up on dates in 2024 by collecting information through a form she’d shared with her Substack, Instagram, and TikTok followers. What started as a goal to set up 50 dates snowballed into setting up more than 200 people, she told BI.

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 dating coach 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 leading to “double dates.”
• FFWD 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 Dating is an app where users are prompted with a question of the day and then matched with people who answered similarly.
• Sitch is an AI-powered dating coach and matchmaking app founded.