How insurgent dating apps like Cerca are capitalizing on the “anti-swipe” moment

After years of chasing growth through swipes, the biggest dating apps and their upstart challengers are banking on quality over quantity.

When Tinder launched in 2012, being able to swipe endlessly was novel and exciting compared to approaching somebody at a bar or a party. But for young people now, swiping feels like a chore — or, at best — a game. As a result, for the past few years, legacy dating apps have struggled to grow their paid users. 

Those companies — Match Group and Bumble — have faced executive turnover amid pressure from investors, while venture capitalists have turned their attention to new entrants. 

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.) The app has more female users than male users, which is the opposite for most dating apps. 

“People don’t hate dating — they hate the product out there,” Myles Slayton, Cerca’s CEO, said in an interview. The 22-year-old graduated from Georgetown University in May and works with his small team of fellow recent grads out of a windowless room in a coworking space in midtown Manhattan.

The app prompts you to sync your contacts and presents you only four profiles of people you have mutual contacts with. (Cerca means “near” in Spanish, which was Slayton’s major in college.)  

“If you’re single, are you going to ask a computer to set you up, or are you going to ask your best friend?” Slayton said. “Most people would go with their friend, and we’re betting on the majority.”

Slayton said Cerca got a flurry of attention from VCs after it was featured on Emily Sundberg’s widely circulated FeedMe newsletter in March. By June, it secured a $1.6 million seed investment from VC firm Corazon Capital, which is led by Sam Yagan, a former CEO of Match Group and founder of OkCupid. 

“We’re in a very anti-swipe moment right now,” Yagan said. “I was looking for something that really speaks to the pendulum swinging to the other side.” 

“Quality over quantity” 

While revenue at Match Group and Bumble has flattened, that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people are willing to spend money to improve their chances of finding a partner. 

Professional matchmakers in Silicon Valley, who charge up to $500,000, are reportedly staying busy. 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.

The exclusivity and price tag means the pool of people is smaller but, in theory, better. Similarly, Cerca narrows the pool to people with mutual contacts and limits it to four swipes a day — something Slayton says frustrates some users. 

Meta announced in September that it would add new features to 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. The announcement sent Match Group and Bumble down 5% and 3%, respectively.

Facebook is more likely to eat at the older user who is still using Match Group’s apps, according to analysts at JPMorgan. “Facebook does have the scale and AI capabilities to potentially impact the online dating category, but we’re skeptical of Gen Z users turning to [Facebook] for dating,” they wrote in a September 23 note.  

Both the rise of new apps like Cerca and Facebook’s “Meet Cute” point at a user who increasingly values getting off the app. 

OkCupid, a Tinder predecessor now also owned by Match Group, was one of the first desktop dating sites. The profile was more comprehensive and included match percentages. 

“The swipe kind of just threw that all away,” Yagan said. “The biggest pendulum swing that Tinder brought was a rejection of the data that we had done.”

Legacy apps are also going through a turnaround. 

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.

Wolfe Herd told analysts on an August 6 earnings call that she “reset our strategy for quality over quantity across the whole business.”

“If you were to swipe through 100 people you never wanted to meet, you would walk away feeling very, very disappointed,” Wolfe Herd said. “But if you were to go through even just 5 or 10 or 15 profiles… and everyone was actually quite interesting to you, you would feel very, very compelled to return.”

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. 

“Tinder has unparalleled brand awareness and scale, but the product has grown stale through a lack of innovation and a focus on short-term monetization,” Rascoff told analysts on an August 5 earnings call.

It launched a double date feature and has other new features in the pipeline. Previously, the focus was on monetizing things like “boosts” that get a user more eyes on their profile. (Match Group’s former CEO, Bernard Kim, previously held leadership roles at gaming companies.) 

Steven Bailey, Match Group’s chief finance officer, described this year as “the biggest culture shift I’ve seen in all my time at Match Group.”

“Spencer has shifted the focus from monetization to outcomes,” Bailey said at the Citi Global TMT Conference on September 3. “It’s a bold shift to make.”