SAN FRANCISCO — After swiping aimlessly for years on dating apps like Hinge and Tinder, Emma Inge, a 25-year-old project manager in San Francisco, decided to try something different.
In September, after following an ad for the website of a startup called Known, Inge spent 20 minutes chatting with an artificial intelligence cupid. Cupid — essentially an AI chatbot — asked her during a phone call what she looked for in a partner, and she shared her preferences (athletic) and warning signs (codependent).
A week later, a notification appeared on his phone. She had a pair, and for a one-time fee of $25, she could meet them at a bar.
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“With the way dating is these days, I thought, ‘Oh, let’s give it a try,’” Inge said. “Let’s do this for history.”
Her experience is an example of how AI is transforming the dating app industry. As startups with AI cupids emerge, the biggest dating apps — Hinge, Tinder, Bumble and Grindr — are trying to leverage the technology to reinvent themselves. They are ushering in a new era of online dating where people pay for some matches premium of AI per week, instead of subscribing to an endless stream of profiles.
“AI already plays an important role in our business, but I think it has the potential to be a game-changer — the next technology revolution,” Hesam Hosseini, chief operating officer of Match Group, which owns Hinge and Tinder, said in an interview.
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The change couldn’t come at a better time for dating apps, many of which have been struggling. Most apps allow users to create free accounts with the option to pay for benefits like unlimited swipes. But satisfaction with the apps fell, as did the number of people willing to pay for them. (Most subscriptions cost around $30 per month.)
Over the last year, Bumble has lost 9% of its paid subscribers, while Match Group has lost 5%, even as both have grown their total number of users. Although paying subscribers are a small part of the users, they generate a large part of the profits. The 20% of Match Group users who pay for features and subscriptions account for 97% of revenue.
Match Group shares are down 80% since their 2021 peak, while Bumble shares are down 90% since its initial public offering that year. The two companies dominate most of the dating app market.
Dating apps face an obstacle the industry calls the “cycle of despair.” This is when people download a dating app, get tired of swiping or suffering.”ghosting” (when the other person disappears without explanation), and then they delete it, only to download it again months later.
A move to AI cupids, Hosseini said, would be similar to the early days of online dating, when sites like eHarmony made users answer 80 questions about themselves to create a profile.
While many startups offer AI cupids, larger apps are just starting to release their own versions. Tinder is testing an AI matchmaking service called Chemistry, which it plans to expand this month. Users will be able to give the app access to their camera roll, which the AI would use to learn more about them. The service will initially be free, but Tinder may start charging for it later.
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Grindr, a dating app for gay men, also launched six AI features it calls gAI (pronounced “gay-eye”). They include a “wingman“an AI tool that can reintroduce old matches and AI-generated summaries of people’s profiles. Grindr plans to include the most popular features in a premium subscription,” said George Arison, CEO.
Hinge, with around 15 million users, uses an AI tool to provide feedback on profiles. This year, the company reprogrammed its matchmaking algorithm with generative AI to better learn users’ preferences, which increased the number of matches by 15%, Hosseini said.
Bumble said it plans to launch an AI matchmaking app by the end of the year, adding that it has not yet defined a business model but may charge per match.
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Big dating app companies are internally testing other AI tools that may never be released, including dating coaches who give feedback and advice after each date and AI clones that can date each other and report the results to their human creators. Facebook Dating, the dating service in the Facebook app, recently introduced an AI feature that allows users to describe their ideal match — dark-skinned, works in technology, lives in New York — to connect them with real people who fit that description.
But companies also face growing resistance to AI “mess” and unwanted automation. Hinge, for example, doesn’t label its AI features as AI.
Many of the changes came with new leadership. Last winter, Match Group hired Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff as CEO. He reorganized the company and personally oversees Tinder. Whitney Wolfe Herd, who founded Bumble in 2014 and left the company in 2024, returned as CEO in March.
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“This is not a fad,” Wolfe Herd said of dating AI at a technology conference last year. “We will invest quickly and with force.”
Inge, the project manager from San Francisco, said she signed up for Hinge and Tinder in college but rarely found meaningful connections. Now she’s “generally against dating apps,” she said, and has tried meeting people in real life. She even joined a running club at 6am to socialize, but it didn’t work out. This led her to try Known.
On the AI-generated date blind date last month, Inge said she went to a bar in San Francisco and was pleasantly surprised by the date. She and the pair chatted for two hours, connecting over a shared interest in public transportation and new restaurants. He worked for a robot taxi company and was “the kind of guy who signs up for AI cupid,” she said.
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They exchanged numbers to arrange a second meeting — which never happened. Inge said she took a ghosting.
“That was the coup, that the AI actually found compatibility,” she said. “It was the human part that didn’t work.”
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