Investors and founders can meet their match with Cherub, the ‘Raya of angel investing’Jaclyn Johnson and Angeline Vuong were on a hike deliberating how hard it can be for people to get started in angel investing when they realized they had stumbled upon a startup idea.
Today they are the co-founders of Cherub, a marketplace that pairs angel investors with entrepreneurs.
Johnson likens Los Angeles-based Cherub to Raya, an online membership-based community for dating, in that it matches founders and angel investors based on their preferences.
Of those deals, 40% were new angel investors, meaning they were accredited investors that had never written checks before.
Angel investor Allen Orr told TechCrunch that he had used other platforms such as AngelList in the past.
A new app called Buffet is aiming to address the loneliness epidemic by helping users meet new people by quickly matching them with a person and a place to meet up (Think Tinder + OpenTable).
Buffet aims to help users meet likeminded individuals, whether they’re looking for a new friend, romantic partner or gym buddy.
So we put one foot in front of the other and stared building Buffet.”To get started with Buffet, users enter five of their interests, such as motorcycles, horseback riding or reading.
Buffet encourages people to go beyond a chatbox and digital communication and actually meet up in the real world.
Hacking believes that if Buffet can win over the average 25-year-old female professional, it can win over anyone.
Tinder-owner Match Group has appointed two new members to its board of directors and signed an agreement with Elliott Management, the company announced on Monday.
Chief marketing officer at Instacart, Laura Jones, and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, will be joining the board, effective immediately.
Match said in a press release that the appointments followed a “a constructive dialogue” with the activist investor, as the two companies have entered in an “information-sharing” agreement.
“We appreciate the collaboration with management and the Board over the past several months, and we are confident that Laura Jones and Spencer Rascoff are strong additions to the Board.
The activist investor’s push for change at the dating firm follows board shakeups at Crown Castle and Etsy.
The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) released a statement on Thursday cheering on the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
The group includes a number of key app makers, including Epic Games, Spotify, Deezer, Match Group, Proton and others.
In 2020, Epic made it possible for Fortnite players to pay Epic directly, rather than giving a cut to Apple.
Then, Apple removed Epic from the App Store, which sparked a slew of legal proceedings.
In a statement, Apple said: “This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.
Maybe it’s no surprise that IO River was launched by two industry veterans.
Co-founders Edward Tsinovoi (CEO) and Michael Hakimi (CTO) worked together for over a decade, including at Akamai’s Tel Aviv office, before founding IO River in late 2022 and participating in the Intel Ignite accelerator program.
All of this is relatively straightforward and for the basic functionality all CDNs have in common (think redirecting URLs, for example), IO River can tap into their native APIs.
CDN services aren’t exactly meant to work together, after all, so there is not a lot of common ground.
What IO River does is provide its own application services like a web application firewall, rate limiting and origin load balancing.
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth announced today that he is joining Match Group, the parent company of several popular dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge.
Yoel, who shared the move on LinkedIn, is now the company’s Vice President of Trust and Safety.
I swiped right on Match Group,” Roth said in his announcement post.
Roth is now taking his trust and safety expertise to Match’s family of dating apps, which includes Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and more.
Although dating apps have built-in features to keep users safe, there is still a lot of toxic behavior on these apps, and not everyone trusts them.
Bumble, a once-powerful force in online dating, is facing a reckoning.
CEO Lidiane Jones announced that 37% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, would be let go, and that Bumble would embark on an app overhaul targeted at reviving growth.
And many of the capabilities introduced in Bumble’s apps in the past 18 months haven’t resonated with the user base, Jones said during the call.
Jones, who joined from Slack in January, appointed four new C-suite executives at Bumble in the last week alone.
Dating apps generally — including Match Group’s — have seen declining revenue from users reluctant to fork over cash for premium add-ons.
Match Group’s deal with OpenAI is just business with AI glitter on topListen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This week, Mary Ann, Kirsten and Alex gathered to chat through a massive sheaf of news.
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more!
In a press release written with help from ChatGPT, Match Group announced an enterprise agreement with the AI chatbot’s maker, OpenAI.
The AI tech will be used to help Match Group employees with work-related tasks, the company says, and come as part of Match’s $20 million-plus bet on AI in 2024.
It even offered a quote from ChatGPT itself: “I’m thrilled that Match Group matched with me.
To keep its corporate data protected, only trained and licensed Match Group employees will have access to OpenAI’s tools, it noted.
Before being able to use these tools, Match Group employees will also have to undergo mandatory training that focuses on responsible use, the technology’s capabilities, as well as its limitations.
For example, the MTA transit system in New York collected more than 18,000 lost items from 2018 to 2023 — and that time includes when people were sheltering in place for the pandemic.
Boomerang thinks AI can fix lost and found.
The Miami-based startup built software that uses machine learning to match pictures and descriptions of lost items.
Customers, which can range from gyms to theme parks, upload pictures and descriptions of their lost and found while consumers do the same for the item they’ve lost.
If there is a match, consumers can choose to pick up their items or have them shipped.
