The Icelandic dating app Smitten raises $10M in Series A funding
Iceland’s most popular dating app, Smitten, has raised $10M in Series A funding from Makers Fund, Possible Ventures, Wonder Invest and current shareholders ByFounders, ProFounders, Tennin, and Smitten’s board member and Vivino founder Heini Zachariassen. The Icelandic-based app which has been expanding to foreign markets will use the financing to grow its team and to keep on expanding abroad as they try to help people find their love with the app’s gamified approach to dating.
The founders of Smitten David Simonarson, CEO, and Asgeir Visir, Designer, launched the app with the CTO, Magnus Olafsson in 2020. Smitten mixes games, entertainment, and flirting to jumpstart conversations and help users engage more seamlessly. Smitten’s fun and creative approach to dating has been very well recieved by the public, proven by the app’s more than 200 million swipes to date and a 30%+ stickiness rate. Smitten tries to make it easier getting into conversations by providing users with games, interactive profiles and icebreakers. The app is supposed to get users into fun, quality conversations regardless of their conversation skills, and has found that more than 60% of Smitten matches result in a post-match interaction.
The key to Smitten’s post-match interactions are mini-games people can play on each other’s profiles. “Our questionnaire game, Guessary, allows you to get to know the other person you are viewing by guessing how they answered a series of Yes-and-No questions,” explained Asgeir Visir. “You could be answering questions like ‘Have they ever been arrested?’ or ‘Do they like pineapple on their pizza?’ and you would get immediate feedback if you answered correctly or not. Another fun game, Lie Detector, is inspired by the age-old social game Two Truths and Lie, where people add three statements about themselves to their profile, and you have one chance to spot the lie. These games are designed for users to get to know the person they are viewing before deciding if they want to like them or not. And the beautiful part is when you match with someone, the results of the games are posted in the chat and act as an icebreaker, making it so much easier to initiate a fun conversation.”
“My co-founder, Asgeir, and I share an intense interest in how people connect and communicate,” says David Simonarson, Smitten Co-Founder and CEO. “After years of creating social consumer apps, we fell in love with the online dating space and launched Smitten in 2020. We created personality-based games and fun interactive profiles to make it easy for strangers to form meaningful connections. Seeing how much our users love Smitten, we believe we can become the leading player in online dating for Generation Z.”
Below you can read Northstack’s previous coverage of Smitten.
