Hinge: An app that scours Facebook friends for dates banks $12m

A dating app that uses your Facebook friends to make recommendations has scored $12m in series-A funding, bringing its total funding to $20.5m.

Hinge hopes to compete with market leader Tinder by offering a better dating experience. Its unique selling point is that recommendations are friends-of-friends - the idea being that social pressures will limit the "rando" aspect of Tinder that many find off-putting.

The app scans your Facebook friends (if you have too few you aren’t allowed to join) and then finds good matches that are sent in updates across the day.

The setup and interface is very much like Tinder's (the company rebuilt itself on a mobile platform last year and includes the swipe feature synonymous with Tinder) but the goal is that it becomes an app that people use to find someone they may actually want to start a relationship with.

The key – as always with straight dating apps – is to get women on board, and save them from being flooded with requests from creepy guys. By screening people through friends own social filters, the Hinge app just might achieve that goal.

The same effort with a different approach is being undertaken by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe and her new Bumble app. Bumble is built around women being in charge of the whole process, and a woman has to respond to a request in 24 hours or any dating connection is dropped. We can see a number of ways in which that approach could fall down but never say never when it comes to dating.

Hinge is based in New York City, but has spread across the US and, according to its CEO Justin McLeod, is seeing its biggest growth in San Francisco.

The app still has some way to go however. Take-up is improving but is still nowhere near competing with Tinder or the more traditional OkCupid or Match dating apps.

The dating scene

As a quick comparison, Tinder has over 10,000 reviews on the Apple Store, scoring an average 4 out of 5 stars. OkCupid has 4,500 reviews, and scores 4.5. Hinge has just 12 reviews, averaging 4.2, putting it in the same bracket as minor-league dating and friend-finding apps Zoosk and Skout.

Hinge hopes to make money by charging a subscription fee to people in order to show them more information about potential dates. That won't happen until 2016.

Its model is also built on a number of presumptions: broad take-up (enough to make a small percentage of subscribers cover the cost); continued used of Facebook by its target market; and making sure its social filtering approach continues to work if it becomes popular.

The key investor behind the new funding round is Shasta Ventures, which has been piling money in startups since raising $300m in June. Its most famous investments have been in Google-bought Nest, as well as Mint and NextDoor.

Previous investors including Lowercase Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Eniac Ventures, CAA Ventures and Middleland Capital also chipped in.

As ever, it’s an educated bet. Hinge CEO McLeod has twice shifted (OK, pivoted) the app in a different direction based on logical business concerns. It has gone from web to mobile, and then friend-finding to dating.

The VCs are betting on him figuring out enough of a market from people that want a better Tinder – or at least one that people want to use for dating rather than hooking up. ®