A luxury matchmaking service has landed in San Francisco with hopes of finding wives and girlfriends for men who have the means — but not the time — to vet suitable mates.

The Bevy, started in New York in 2014, compares its services to an executive search. It pre-screens and interviews potential candidates before setting up its male clients with a handful of curated contenders. (Women can join the company’s database for free for an unlimited amount of time.)

The service’s clients are looking for a relationship with a woman who can play the part with aplomb — albeit with a bit of regional nuance. “They are too busy to babysit or hand-hold,” said co-founder Nikki Lewis. “So the biggest want in New York, a city of such driven people, is for women as successful as the men.”

In L.A., she said, there are a lot of Hollywood film types, so she expects a degree of superficiality. Still, clients might say something like: “Don’t set me up with a struggling actress, but someone of substance who’s looking for a relationship,” she said.

A “bevy” is “a large group of people or things of a particular kind,” according to Google Dictionary — and that is what the company is hoping to cultivate in San Francisco: Women who are college-educated (or at least gainfully employed) and who have a healthy lifestyle and take care of themselves.

“(Clients) are meeting plenty of women, but their time is important — they are building a career and a nest egg — so they want to be efficient and proactive with their time,” said Bevy’s other co-founder, Greta Tufvesson.

The cost of outsourcing Cupid’s bow in San Francisco? It begins at $25,000 for a one-year membership. The tab increases as the project of finding a future plus-one becomes more challenging, as is typical for older men who have more inherent “baggage” (such as children or a divorce), according to Lewis and Tufvesson.

At a time when gender and wage imbalances are in the spotlight, the comparison to an executive search might be all too poignant. By delegating the decision-making to men, is “culture fit” simply being replaced with “chemistry?”

And it does beg the question: For the man who can buy everything, are a wife and kids the ultimate acquisition?

Lewis and Tufvesson say this business model has been successful in other cities, and is what the market demands. (The price of privacy is so high, in fact, the Bevy declined to provide examples of past clients or matches for this article.) The company reports a 95 percent success rate, defined as a meaningful relationship of at least four months.

Lewis emphasized the personal attention provided to members. “It’s not Three Day Rule; there are no wasted dates,” she said. “Greta and I don’t like to delegate personal meetings to our 20-year-old interns.”

Three Day Rule, a national matchmaking service, has 8,000 members and five Bay Area matchmakers in the Bay Area, including one dedicated to the South Bay. Services for paying clients start at $4,500, but the service also has a free database.

Three Day Rule senior matchmaker Carla Swiryn considers the Bevy’s approach “a traditional model where the men are in power and control.

“When a service is designed for just the men to pay, it’s only catering to the men. It is essentially saying that women are not worthwhile enough to focus on … and the women are just at the whim of both them and the matchmakers,” Swiryn says.

“Our approach is very different — we treat everyone the same.” (The company says that clients and prospective matches meet only with professional matchmakers.)

Three Day Rule’s chief executive officer Talia Goldstein has a slightly more tempered approach to the gender imbalance. “Most matchmaking companies only work with male clients and have men pay, and I think it’s because men are easier to match,” Goldstein said. “A lot of men only want a few things that they are looking for, so it is a smart business decision.”

She said that 60 percent of Three Day Rule’s clients are female.

Both companies report that clients are seeking relief from dating apps. “You never get feedback, and people are ghosting left and right, and you don’t understand why,” Goldstein said.

Apps also have a pervasive “hookup” reputation. “I was speaking to a potential client in San Francisco who is 29 and he said all of his friends are starting to get married, and his other friends are using apps for sport, but not to meet anyone,” Lewis said.

Still, free dating apps can be an equalizer. Matches are by and large based on initial attraction, rather than the success of one’s startup.

The newest such offering to San Francisco is the Inner Circle, an app founded in Amsterdam in 2012, whose founder, David Vermeulen, is looking for “inspiring and ambitious” members who are 25 to 45 and live in the world’s major cities. He said that people who are accepted, primarily through social media evaluation, tend to be open-minded, enjoy travel and be more serious about looking for a relationship. And those with bathroom-mirror selfies and duck face? “Maybe this is not the platform for you,” Vermeulen said with a chuckle. The cost to join once accepted is free, but members can pay up to $10 a week to access extra features.

“We really believe that if you have a community of like-minded people, that will work in the end much better,” Vermeulen said. “Exclusivity creates more of a community feeling. It’s more safe and trustworthy.”

There’s also the League, an invite-only app founded by Amanda Bradford in San Francisco in 2015 with an approach modeled after private, members-only clubs. Both apps host in-person events for members, and both try to balance out membership between men and women. However, the Inner Circle has more women than men in every city other than Milan, he said.

The Bevy’s Lewis and Tufvesson spend most of their days with women who fill out an online bio and submit photos, followed by a personal one-on-one meeting in hopes of joining the Bevy database. The men provide the same type of information, but answer a more in-depth questionnaire.

The Bevy makes it a point to provide women with details about each client’s personality, rather than how that $25,000 was earned. Then, the women set up the first date and the client must only show up — and have realistic expectations.

“We never really have a bad date,” Tufvesson said, “but the chemistry part we can’t predict … we offer quality women — ”

“But we don’t manufacture them,” Lewis added.

She said that San Francisco clients have been excited because the two bring “a New York sophistication” and “finesse.”

The two met while honing the matchmaking craft at an unnamed New York “introduction firm” in 2010, whose growth and influence, Tufvesson said, inspired her to pursue her vision. She had a background in marketing and lifestyle brands, having worked with the likes of Elie Tahari and Donna Karan, while Lewis had worked in luxury branding and celebrity public relations after studying theater at New York University.

“The transition into matchmaking from my career in branding was fluid,” Tufvesson said. “It was always my job to build strong emotional connections with my consumers, whether I was selling a handbag, a hotel experience or people. Listening, exchanging stories and demonstrating empathy formed lasting connections.”

In San Francisco, the Bevy relies on word of mouth and media coverage to attract clients. The partners are already seeing a lot of tech geeks, who are younger and looking to break out of their social circle or industry. “It could potentially be our biggest market,” Tufvesson said. “We don’t know that yet because we are new, but we have a ton of potentials lined up and a lot of momentum.”

As the company builds its database in the Bay Area, they have a wish list of San Francisco clients: “4-Hour-Workweek” author Tim Ferriss, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky; (newly divorced) One Kings Lane founder Ali Pincus; and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg — if the Bevy ever expands to women.

Maghan McDowell is a Peninsula freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com.

By women, for women who like women

The market for finding true love is perpetually ripe for disruption, and another company in San Francisco is gaining ground — but not with tech guys, well off or otherwise.

Her is a female-only dating app founded by London’s Robyn Exton, who relocated to San Francisco in 2015 to court investors after creating the lesbian dating app called Dattch.

The San Francisco mating call was strong. “We were gaining huge ground with our previous app in the U.S., and knew it was going to be our main market so we’d most likely end up there,” Exton said, in addition to allowing her to be closer to the company’s investors.

She said that the city’s lifestyle plays a major role in the local dating scene, and although there are only 800,000 residents, which offers a smaller dating pool, S.F. is among the app’s top 25 cities. “People aren’t out in bars as much; they meet with groups of friends for activities so you’re more likely to meet friends of friends for a potential date than you are going to approach a stranger in a bar.”

She also saw a need in the market, which is now 2 million users strong. “There wasn’t anything in existence that was clearly built for a queer female audience that focused on the unique ways women date, as well as how we use technology,” she said. But it’s not all limited to screen time — Exton reports that Her hosts events in 24 cities across the world, with a recent expansion into Oakland.

— M.M.

Dating resources

The Bevy http://the-bevy.com/

Three Day Rule https://www.threedayrule.com/

Her https://weareher.com.

The Inner Circle https://www.theinnercircle.co/