When Carly Malatskey worked at venture firm Floodgate, she was dubbed “the dating app guru.”
Malatskey immediately received all proposals for dating app companies. She handled everything from filling out a 200-answer questionnaire to sifting through pitches advertised as “Hinge with a twist.”
“When I would see all of these dating startups at Floodgate, they were all truly a copy-paste of Bumble, Hinge and Tinder with a slight nuance,” Malatskey said. “But the nuance was never that remarkable because fundamentally the issue is still the same.”
In February, Malatskey founded Joey AI, an artificial intelligence-based matchmaking company based in Santa Monica. The firm isn’t necessarily a dating app. Users call a phone number, and an AI voice assistant – known as Joey – asks several questions before bidding them a good day and hanging up. There’s no profile to create. There’s no app to scroll on. One day, Joey may text a user when it thinks it has found a good match, and if both people are interested, it will connect them via text.
Founder: Carly Malatskey of Joey AI. (Photo by David Sprague)
So-called “dating app fatigue” – caused by confusing social rules, self-imposed pressures to look good and the endless cycle of fragile connections failing – is hurting companies’ financial results. In March, Bumble Inc. reported a 10% year-over-year revenue decline, attributed to waning engagement and fewer paid users. At Match Group, which owns West Hollywood-based Tinder Inc., total revenue was flat year over year.
However, it looks like artificial intelligence could be the key to reviving the struggling sector. Around 10% of all dating app companies are using AI today, according to PitchBook. As users find it harder to connect on dating apps, companies as big as Tinder and Grindr Inc. and as small as the nascent Joey AI are experimenting with the technology to make the process easier.
“The point isn’t ‘AI’ for its own sake,” Grindr Chief Executive George Arison said in a statement. “It’s fewer dead ends, less noise and more real connections.”
At Tinder, Chief Executive Spencer Rascoff is acutely aware that users are experiencing swipe fatigue. Founded in 2012, Tinder is a pioneer in the dating app space, but it quickly has seen its popularity dwindle as other companies have launched their own competing apps.
“Our 2026 product roadmap at Tinder directly addresses the most common Gen Z pain points,” Rascoff said during quarterly earnings in March. “They want better outcomes, so we’re focusing on relevant match quality. They want authenticity and trust, so we’re further strengthening verification and safety.”
In March, Tinder unveiled a slew of AI product features aimed at combating its decline in users, including Chemistry. The feature uses AI to determine how compatible users are and to glean more information about a person by analyzing their photos.
“Chemistry is an AI way to interact with Tinder and answer questions in order to then get just a single drop or two rather than swiping through many, many profiles,” Rascoff said. “It’s also a way to connect your camera roll to Tinder and then let Tinder draw out insights from your camera roll. And today, that’s in service of driving a custom AI-driven recommendation drop.”
The company also rolled out safety features that use AI to detect potentially harmful language in messages users may send or receive, as well as blur images that might be unwanted for the recipient.
Though Tinder’s fourth-quarter direct revenue was down 3%, with paid users declining by 8%, Rascoff said during earnings that it’s a necessary trade-off to make long-term improvements to the platform. When Rascoff took the reins of Dallas, Texas-based Match Group in 2025, he also appointed himself chief executive of Tinder to fix the struggling platform, which at the time was the largest contributor to Match Group’s revenue decline, according to earnings reports.
“We’re expanding the ways that people get started – from new formats and real-world experiences to profiles that help show who you really are,” Rascoff said in a statement. “We’re using AI to surface more relevant connections and continuing to raise the bar on safety so that people feel confident taking the next step.”
Joey does away with profiles and swiping altogether. When users call Joey, it asks a handful of questions: “What time did you wake up today? How often did you work out this week? Are you the person who makes all the plans in your friend group, or are you more ‘go with the flow’? Where do you buy your groceries from?”
“I talked to a few relationship scientists while building Joey,” Malatskey said. “(One) said, ‘I think I know more about a person based (on) a grocery store they go to than probably anything on a Hinge profile.’”
What kind of information does Joey distill from a user who says they shop at, say, an Erewhon? That’s part of the backend, Malatskey said. She aims to use voice AI to shift users away from heavily curated profiles, which she says impede authenticity.
“You can now talk and convey who you are by being asked the right questions,” she said. “You can share the nuance, and Joey can now get the nuance.”
AJ Balance, Grindr’s chief product officer, doesn’t like to call the company a dating app.
Though Grindr began serving the queer dating community in 2009, the company has since expanded to accommodate the many ways users have come to use the platform.
“We started as a dating app for casual dating. But now our users use it for dating, to make friends, to make companions when they travel,” Balance said. “Because users are seeking casual connections, long-term relationships, travel tips, ways to meet up with people when they’re exploring your city or traveling in other cities, we are building a set of features across those different use cases.”
Platform: AJ Balance is the chief product officer of Grindr. (Photo by Rich Schmitt)
That’s where AI comes in. Because users have different intentions on Grindr, the company has to create specific offerings for each person on the app. One of Grindr’s AI functions, Wingman, helps users find people who are looking for the same thing they are. Wingman can suggest profile improvements or conversation starters.
The company also built a product called Smart Inbox, which prioritizes what it believes are the most compatible connections at the top. There’s also an A-List, which is a curated list of a user’s favorite people to talk to on the app.
“We have a lot of conversations happening,” Balanche said. “And for something like A-List, we can summarize those conversations and actually help you figure out, from all the people you’ve talked to, who’s a really great fit and stay in touch with them.”
Eighty-two percent of Gen Z American daters are already using AI in some form while dating, according to a 2025 report by the dating app Hily, whether to spruce up a profile, start a conversation, or get general advice about a predicament. That tracks – dating apps received $3.5 billion in venture funding in 2025, all of which use AI in their product.
“Especially with AI and dating, I think the opportunity is there, and we’re in a whole new wave of dating, but there’s so much noise surrounding it,” said Malatskey. “At the core, we just want people to meet more people that they can connect with.”