Triangulate Gets Cash From Playdom Chairman, Others For Facebook Dating App
-
Comments (View)
- Text Size: A A
-
Email
-
Share
Triangulate, a startup trying to build an online dating business on Facebook, has raised $750,000 from Trinity Ventures and Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson. Triangulate is the latest so-called “social dating” site to attract interest from investors; Zoosk, the most established player in the market, has raised more than $40 million, while SmartDate, raised $2.2 million in March.
Triangulate’s Facebook app, called Wings, uses data from a member’s Facebook profile, as well as from their accounts on Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Twitter and Foursquare, to automatically generate a basic dating profile for them, which includes topics they are interested in, where they like to hang out, and who their friends tend to be.
Users can edit the profiles, but by relying primarily on users’ online actions, instead of what members say about themselves, CEO Sunil Nagaraj says Wings can make better matches. The service is free to use, although members can use Facebook Credits to pay for additional options, like sending more messages to other members.
Wings launched “in earnest” in June, and so far has roughly 40,000 users. That isn’t quite enough to make it useful in some geographies. For instance, in Seattle, where I live, it only returned 10 possible matches even after I said I was interested in a very big range of possible partners. But Nagaraj tells us that the service currently has its biggest user base in California and is planning to use some of the cash it just raised to build up its user base via marketing.
Related Stories
Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital, Social Media, Community, rick thompson, triangulate, trinity ventures
Newsletter
