(Bloomberg) -- Grindr Inc. unveiled several major updates to its flagship dating app, many of them powered by artificial intelligence, in a bid to drive user engagement and revenue growth.
The LGBTQ dating brand plans to let users opt into AI-powered features that the company says can analyze their conversations and in-app behavior to produce summaries, better sort already-matched profiles and give more personalized recommendations, Chief Executive Officer George Arison and Chief Product Officer AJ Balance said in an interview.
Chat summaries, for example, will allow users to pick up where they left off by seeing themes from a past conversation or where they last met their dates, Balance said. “A-List,” meanwhile, is an automatically created list that surfaces “users you’ve had meaningful conversations with before,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
These are just two of six products Grindr plans to launch this year, building on a list of features the company teased at its investor day last June. The firm said at the time that the new features, along with a push into offering travel recommendations, will help it meet an aggressive annual revenue growth target of 20% to 25% through 2027.
Grindr’s trajectory of gains represents a bright spot in the dating app sector, which has otherwise seen a decline in paid users across competing services from Match Group Inc. and Bumble Inc. Grindr’s stock price more than doubled in 2024, while Match and Bumble shares saw double-digit declines.
While some of the new features announced Tuesday will ultimately live behind a paywall, some will be offered through a free trial this year to encourage user engagement, Arison said. Users could get five free chat summaries before being prompted to subscribe, for example.
“We don’t want Grindr to become some of our peer apps where they’re just focused on monetization,” he said. “We’re going to maintain a very robust free product we have already.”
The company also said its AI-based “Wingman” feature, which it had expected to launch in 2027, has already been rolled out in testing to 10,000 users in the US, several quarters ahead of schedule.
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