"Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI. Specifically, the cofounder and CEO of dating app Hinge is concerned that his users-many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years-might fall in love with it instead of one another."
"Bumble, once the women-first darling, has shed 460,000 paying users since the end of 2024, prompting the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in March. She's embarked on an aggressive retrenchment campaign that has included laying off 30% of the staff. Tinder, meanwhile, has lost more than 1.5 million paying users since its peak in 2022. Its parent company, Match Group, has also recorded steady revenue declines for the past three years for its business unit that includes former stalwarts like Match.com and OkCupid."
Justin McLeod, Hinge cofounder and CEO, worries that AI chatbots could supplant human romantic relationships by providing constant, nonrejection interactions. McLeod has spent 15 years studying relationship dynamics and believes chatbots deliver exactly what many people crave. While competitors struggle—Bumble shed 460,000 paying users prompting founder Whitney Wolfe Herd's return and mass layoffs, and Tinder lost over 1.5 million paying users—Hinge grew paying users 17% year over year to 1.87 million in Q3 and reported about $550 million revenue in 2024 and over $500 million in the first nine months of 2025.
Read at Fast Company
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