Every Grindr user is unique. Italian men love feet. South Koreans prefer open relationships. The highest percentage of self-proclaimed “daddies” call the US home, and Switzerland is overrun with twinks. Delivered by annual trend report Grindr Unwrapped, those critical insights offer the type of information that will help usher the company into its “AI-first” era where it’s “the everything app for the gay guy,” CEO George Arison tells WIRED.
Grindr was the first to leverage geo-location tech when it burst onto the scene in 2009. Arison arrived at the company in 2022 from the world of automotive ecommerce. With him at the helm, the company has undergone “a bit of a refounding,” he says, including a major overhaul of staff—85 percent of its current 160 US employees were hired in the past three years—and bigger investments in product.
All of his moves, he says, have been about building trust with users. Grindr may indeed be the most popular gay dating and hookup app in the world, but its popularity has only made it a target of controversy, including a 2024 lawsuit that alleged users’ HIV status and testing information was shared with third-party vendors, and in July, criticism for blocking users who posted the phrase “no Zionists” in their profile. Skepticism over Arison’s conservative politics probably hasn’t helped either.
Even so, Arison tells me he is laser-focused on the task ahead. One that almost didn’t happen. Controlling stakeholders Raymond Zage and James Lu submitted an offer to take the company private in October. The bid—a buyout that valued the company at $3 billion—came to an anticlimactic end in November when they failed to come up with the money. The acquisition could have potentially derailed Arison’s priorities, but for now that’s all behind him.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
JASON PARHAM: Grindr is now positioning itself as more than a place for hookups. It wants to be a social everything app. Why?
GEORGE ARISON: We didn’t really have a mission before 2023. But it was always more than a hookup app, because it was being used for so many different things, but no one had said, “OK, this is what we want to be.” This year is when we really went after the gayborhood vision. Now we are actually building features that intentionally support all these different use cases in which people are engaged in on the app.