Celeste Amadon and Asher Allen were working on an app that used AI to book restaurants for dates when they stumbled on a bigger idea that encourages people to meet in person. And now it’s catching on with investors.
The duo created a voice-powered AI onboarding system for its app that helped them learn more about users without them having to fill out a form. What they discovered: People loved to talk, and that increased the length of the onboarding session with the app clocking 26 minutes on average. That is how San Francisco-based dating startup Known was born.
“Our take is that for the first time, we could know enough about somebody to serve them a date that would make sense. And if we could do that much faster with less rejection rate, we could create a user experience that could get people out on more dates,” she said.
Image Credits:Known
And early results suggested they were on to something.
In its test phase in San Francisco, Known said it observed 80% of its introductions led to physical dates, which is much higher than swipe-based dating apps. Buoyed by these signals, the startup has raised $9.7 million from investors, including Forerunner and NFX, along with Pear VC and Coelius Capital. Notably, this is the first dating app investment for Forerunner.
“Celeste is a really thoughtful founder to understand the mindset of the consumer, which is a young female, to be honest. There are other people who can be focused on the male demographic, but she is focused on the young female who has a lot of unspoken desires and needs that, if you put them in a profile, they would never say, this versus that. And I think in a conversation, you can get a lot of those nuances out, but in the past, the conversation required a $10,000 matchmaker,” Eurie Kim, a partner at Forerunner, told TechCrunch.
Amadon said she has always been very interested in social impact at scale and thinks dating is inherently one of the biggest problems facing her generation.
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“There’s been a million pieces written about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S. And I do really think that it’s our generation’s largest problem,” said Amadon, who, along with Allen, dropped out of Stanford to build the startup.
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