Dating app Jigsaw raises $3.7 M in Seed financing

Valentine’s Day is over, but the dating market is expanding every day. Yesterday it became known about the investment in the company Jigsaw. The app raised $3.7M in Seed financing, with The Relationship Corp. leading the way with the participation of business angels.

While Tinder leads the list of apps where users spend the most time, and Bumble is storming the exchange, the “Tinder model” and major market players are being criticized: widespread harassment, slow response to complaints about rape, changes in our perception of people and potential partners. Can the algorithm choose a pair for us? Is it possible to choose a couple only from a profile photo?

Jigsaw announces a “crusade” against the most common model of dating apps — selecting a partner by profile picture. The internal mechanics of the service hide the person’s face behind the details of the puzzle, which go away in the process of communication. Also inside the app, you can’t use photos with appearance-enhancing filters or game filters, such as the famous cat ears from Snapchat. “Reveal what’s real” is the company’s motto. The founders aim to make communication in the app less superficial than that of their major competitors.

Now the app has a little more than 150 000 users (Tinder had about 50M users last year). The project team was not the first to come up with the idea of “hidden” photos. Special services for the Muslim market (Veil) and a number of platforms that give access to photos only after the first message in the chat (for example, Taffy) have already done so. Another app in this series, INYN, positions itself as a platform for those who are tired of classic online dating. However, Jigsaw offers the most visually understandable and, importantly, gamified mechanism for getting to know the photo of the interlocutor.