matchmaking
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Info Edge Turned a Job Board Into a Bet on India’s Internet
Naukri pays for much of the ambition behind 99acres, Jeevansathi and a far-reaching startup portfolio. Now AI is helping the recruitment business while disrupting another member of the family.
Matrimony.com built a business on being particular
Language, community, income, family: the owner of BharatMatrimony made India’s marriage preferences its product. Its harder match has been finding growth beyond the search for a spouse.
Lisa Purdum Has Spent 25 Years Making the First Date Less Accidental
Long before swiping became a reflex, Lisa Purdum was interviewing singles face to face. Her career is a study in what technology still struggles to supply: context, candor, and the nerve to give a promising person another hour.
Three Day Rule's $6,300 Cure for Swipe Fatigue - and the Awkward AI Bet That Could Change It
For 15 years, Three Day Rule sold busy singles a human antidote to endless swiping. Now its new owner is trying to bottle that judgment in an app - without turning romance into a chatbot relay.
Two Riot Vets Bet $49M That a Game Could Feel Like Church
They left Riot to make an online world that welcomed the people MMOs usually scare off. Palia found 10 million of them - and still cost the founders the studio.
Ditto
Ditto is a Berkeley-born AI matchmaker that skips the swiping. Students text their preferences, and every Wednesday Ditto sends one curated match over iMessage - with the time, place, and coffee-date logistics already handled. Founded by UC Berkeley students Allen Wang and Eric Liu, it went viral through sorority group chats, grew to roughly 100,000 users across about ten campuses, and raised a $9.2M seed led by Peak XV. Its bet: dating apps optimize for time-on-app, but people actually want a good date in real life.
Liam McGregor
Liam McGregor is the founder and CEO of Marriage Pact, the campus matchmaking phenomenon he built in 2017 as a Stanford economics class project and turned into a company that has matched hundreds of thousands of students across 100-plus colleges. Trained in computer science and economics, McGregor treats romance as a market-design problem, pairing people on deep values rather than looks or swipes. Before Marriage Pact he was an early team member at self-driving startup Luminar and worked in data science at Microsoft. He is also a competitive classical guitarist and self-described 'closet urbanist.'
Triumph
Triumph (Triumph Labs) is a San Francisco company that turns ordinary mobile games into real-money skill tournaments. Its plug-and-play SDK lets developers add cash competitions with a single line of code, while Triumph handles the hard parts behind the scenes: payments, KYC identity checks, state-by-state legal compliance, geolocation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, and payouts. Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Jake Brooks and Jared Geller, the company raised $14.1M (a $10.2M Series A led by General Catalyst plus a $3.9M seed) and also runs its own consumer apps - Triumph Arcade for skill games and Rips for card collectibles.
Coffee Meets Bagel
Coffee Meets Bagel is a relationship-focused dating app founded by Korean-American sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang. Built on the idea that quality beats quantity, it serves curated daily matches rather than infinite swipes - aimed at people who want commitment, not entertainment.
Soo Kang
Soo Kang is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Coffee Meets Bagel, the women-focused dating app she built alongside her sisters Arum and Dawoon. A Korean-American designer by training, Soo immigrated to the US at age 12, studied at Parsons School of Design, and brought creative direction and brand identity to one of the most distinctive dating apps on the market. The company famously turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank - the largest offer in the show's history at the time - and went on to raise $23.2 million in total funding with $36 million in annual revenue.
Thanh Tran
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.