With social changes and social distancing, quarantines and lockdowns have sent us out of the dating game. As longing and loneliness reached a new high, a new normal is now being witnessed. The phenomenal rise of dating apps.
As people look for new ways to connect more, come together and be more open without meeting, finding love is now becoming easier with the emergence and the new wave of dating apps and their interesting intuitive features.
Love in times of Covid-19
Cashing in on this rise of these dating apps is London-based Thursday, which has now secured £2.5million investment. Set out to raise £1.25 million in 10 days, the co-founders George Rawlings and Matt McNeill Love achieved the milestone in four days, then later closed the round with £2.5million of investment.
Aware of the indecisive nature of millennial Brits and born from the belief that people are spending too much time on dating apps, this launch is set to carve new waves in the dating world by only being live on one day of the week, Thursdays. The app made its debut in London and New York on Thursday, 27 May, with thousands of love-hungry males and females sending over 100,000 likes, resulting in almost 7,000 matches in one day.
Investors galore
The team used Ascension Ventures to kick start the round as well as Best Nights VC (previously M-Venture), the investment arm of Jägermeister; Connect Ventures, which were early backers of CityMapper; TypeForm and FIIT, all of which was processed through SeedLegals. Other important angels that have invested in the start up dating platform include Tom Blomfield, the founder of Monzo; Matt Robinson, founder of GoCardless and Nested; Ian Hogarth, founder of Songkick; Eldar Tuvey, founder of Wandera and Henry de Zoute, founder of LookAfterMyBills.
Expanding team and going global
The investment will be used to grow the ‘A Team’ at Thursday. Noteworthy new roles will include Head of Growth, Head of Marketing, a Finance Director and a new Chairman as well as a vast uplift in the development team with eight new tech roles being hired. The funding will also be used to implement a six-figure marketing strategy and fund future plans to introduce the app into a number of major cosmopolitan cities around the world with a view to becoming the most widely used dating app globally.
Thursday Dating
Thursday is currently live across London and New York and has had over 52,000 downloads. Last Thursday on 17 June 2021, over 110,000 likes were sent, resulting in 7,500 matches in one day.
Talking about the new funding, Co-founder George Rawlings comments, “Just four weeks into launching and we’re delighted to have a number of notable investors on board who really believe in our vision and back this app. We’ve got big plans with a clear mission, to change a culture of how people date. This is just the start and we will deliver. Dating apps just got exciting again.”
Co-founder Matt McNeill Love says: “This is the first version of Thursday and it’s definitely not perfect so in the short term we are going to use this time to tighten up the app, introduce some new features and continue to develop our matching algorithm to make it the most efficient and intuitive matching system on the market. We’re also going to be introducing a not been done before, revolutionary feature, which will really assist with matches resulting in dates.”
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