Gen Z dating apps like Ditto ditch swiping in favor of AI matchmaking

With any dating app, and especially one that minimizes the time between matching and going out, it can be hard to discern the safety of a situation — is the person you’re meeting really who they say they are? For now, while Ditto is only available at a few dozen colleges, there’s a built-in vetting process in which you know that someone is a student at your university with a .edu email. Ditto is focused on figuring out how to grow to more schools — and eventually beyond just college — while scaling safely. Even for the most established and well-funded dating apps, this is a challenging endeavor. But Ditto does have $9.2 million in seed funding to work with from investors like Gradient, Peak XV, and Scribble.

Wang said, “99% of the investors just reached out to us through inbound, because we were pretty big on LinkedIn and Twitter for a bit. Even Duolingo’s co-founder Severin reached out to me saying, ‘Hey, love your mission, I really like what you do, let’s hop on a call.'”

Ditto has been able to establish this notoriety through its irreverent marketing, like videos of robot stunts. Now based in San Francisco, Ditto has 12 full-time employees, but they’re also hiring a “chief yacht officer” to throw promotional parties (yes, this is a legitimate job listing).

“Our users are college students, and they can smell corporate marketing from a mile away,” Wang said. “But the stunts are the top of the funnel, not the product … Viral moments get college kids to look; a good first date is what makes them stay.”