Investors Swipe Right on S'More Seed Round
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior reporter, covering venture capital. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks. Follow him on Twitter.
The dating app, S'More, which is short for Something More, is getting some love from investors.
The New York-based company, billing itself as the first anti-superficial dating app, raised $2.1 million in seed funding led by Benson Oak Ventures to bring its fundraising total to $3 million.
The service, which debuted in Los Angeles in June, says it has registered more than 165,000 users since it came out of stealth mode last March and is seeing 20% to 30% monthly growth. Users skew female and young, with more than half under 35 years old.
On most dating apps, pictures are paramount. But on S'more, photos are blurred out until users have spent time talking to each other.
The new funding will be used to expand the company's operations by hiring a full-time development team and expanding marketing to get ready for a full nationwide rollout.
Under stay-at-home orders, dating apps have been one of the only ways for singles to meet during the pandemic and have seen explosive growth as a result. Earlier this month, Bumble filed paperwork to go public.
"The dating and social discovery space is in an accelerated-growth mode, with the industry expanding more than 18 percent in 2020, and a flurry of investor activity including IPOs, acquisitions, spin-offs, and newly funded start-ups," Adam Cohen-Aslatei, CEO and Founder of S'More, said in a statement. "The downside is that dating products have become stale and lack(ed) innovation for years. S'More aims to change that by offering daters a deeper way to connect beyond the swipe of a headshot."
S'More also announced it is redesigning its app to allow users to include more multimedia in their portfolios and make it easier for them to chat with each other. It is also adding a meter to indicate when profiles will unblur.
Other investors in the seed round include Workplay Ventures (Mark Pincus), Gaingels, Loud Capital/Pride Fund, Kenny Harris (Plusgrade), Justen Stepka (Enterprise Fund), Rafael Vivas (AppLovin), George Church (Harvard/MIT), John Abbott (former CEO The Meet Group), SideCar Angels, and Brad Weschler (former CEO IMAX), and Joshua Black (Apollo Management).
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