aters have soured on swiping. Meet the insurgent dating app capitalizing on the “anti-swipe” moment
Match Group and Bumble have faced executive turnover amid pressure from investors, while venture capitalists have turned their attention to new entrants to the online dating scene.
One of those apps is Cerca, which has 85,000 downloads as of September, roughly three months after it launched. Tinder had 20,000 downloads in its first three months, the company told Business Insider at the time.
Cerca got a flurry of attention from VCs after it was featured on Emily Sundberg’s widely circulated FeedMe newsletter in March, and by June, it had secured a $1.6 million seed investment from Corazon Capital, which is led by a former CEO of Match Group and founder of OkCupid.
Raya, an invite-only $24.99-a-month dating app, is another VC darling that is increasing in popularity. The app, known for being used by celebrities and wealthy socialites, has a waitlist of 2.5 million people, the company recently told The Wall Street Journal.
Even Meta is sensing an opportunity, announcing in September that it would expand Facebook Dating, which launched in 2018 with little fanfare. The new features, which it said are meant to address “swipe fatigue,” include an AI dating assistant and “Meet Cute,” which provides personalized matches through an algorithm rather than swiping.
Both the rise of new apps like Cerca and Facebook’s Meet Cute point to a user who increasingly values getting off the app.
The Takeaway
The dating app market is getting as cutthroat as the dating market, and the pair of publicly traded companies that dominate the field — Bumble and Match — are trying to keep up. In January, Bumble reinstated its founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, as CEO after she stepped down a year earlier. Blackstone, one of its largest shareholders, sold a chunk of its stake in the company earlier this year. And in February, Match Group tapped Zillow cofounder Spencer Rascoff as its CEO. Rascoff, who served on the board since March 2024, acknowledges that Tinder is where it is because it didn’t innovate.