David and Asgeir have been building consumer apps for the past ten years, including a previous dating app called The One. The One was focused on scarcity, allowing you to only match with one person a day under the hypothesis that this would drastically increase the level of interaction.

However, users disagreed, and David and Asgeir quickly realized that people were actually looking for a fun, more playful experience, which allowed you to get to know the other person without being under the guise that you will get married after the first date.

My experience also echoed their realization: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard friends of mine complaining about Tinder, both in terms of getting the right type of matches and how hard it is to start and maintain conversations. I was, therefore, fully brought into the vision that David was sharing with me.

Taking this into account, David and Asgeir created Smitten (https://smittendating.com/): a dating app for Gen Z designed for interaction and making meeting new people a playful and fun experience.

The timing for this is impeccable: we have seen several dating waves, where the first one was players like Match.com, who helped bring dating online, and increased the size of the dating pool. 

The second wave was Tinder, Grindr, and Hinge. They helped organize the dating game with an easy-to-use interface, ensuring that better matches could be made.

The third wave has been started by Smitten and is focused on trying to solve the low level of interactions post-match, low match-to-conversation ratios, which lead to higher churn and lower overall user satisfaction by introducing a more playful and immersive experience.

This is underlined by their success in Iceland, where they have managed to penetrate a large part of their target audience (Gen Z and young millennials). Their users are more engaged than on Tinder - so engaged that they are already signing up for a premium experience!

Smitten has already added several features unique to the platform, such as the ability to play games and opening up for natural conversation starters. Their long-term vision is to build even more features on top of their original interface and include things such as further personification of profiles and microtransactions/gifting.

We are super excited to join Smitten’s journey of building a next-gen dating app and are, therefore, leading their $2.7m Seed round together with Profounders, Brunnur Ventures, Inventures, and several high-profile angels, including our Collective member: Heini Zachariassen, Founder of Vivino.

If you are looking to join the next consumer social unicorn out of Europe and help people to have fun, entertaining, and meaningful interactions, find their open positions here: https://jobs.50skills.com/smittendating/en 

You can also read more on Sifted: https://sifted.eu/articles/dating-app-smitten/