First influx of outside capital values dating app for gay and bisexual men at $155m and will pay for new features and services

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Grindr, the dating and social networking app for gay and bisexual men, has hooked up with a Chinese partner for its first ever outside investment.

The gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech paid $98.4m (£68.4m) for a 60% controlling stake in Grindr, valuing the California-based business at $155m. It is expected to use the app’s popularity as a way of boosting income from outside China by directing users towards its games.

Joel Simkhai, who founded Grindr with a few thousand dollars of his own money six years ago, assured users in an open letter that it would be “business as usual”. He added, however, that they could expect the company to expand its services.

Grindr lets men find others nearby by displaying pictures of users and their location. Two million users a day in 196 countries tap on a picture to read a brief profile, chat, send pictures and arrange to meet.

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Despite its runaway global success, the app does not list China among its top 10 markets by daily active users. The US tops the list, followed by the UK, Mexico, Brazil and France.

Grindr has a Chinese-language version, but it has faced stiff competition from the locally developed Blued, founded in 2012 by Ma Baoli, a former police officer.

The relative privacy of mobile phones has helped Blued grow rapidly in a country where gay and bisexual men face severe discrimination, to the point where it has about 15 million users.

Acquiring a Chinese investor could help Grindr gain a larger foothold in the country, while giving Kunlun access to its users’ wallets.

Grindr offered a clue to its seeking potential new sources of income earlier this month, when the fashion house JW Anderson streamed its latest catwalk show live on the app. About three-quarters of its revenue comes from subscriptions to its premium service Grindr Xtra, with the remainder derived from advertising.

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A previous attempt to expand with an app called Blendr, a social network not exclusively for gay and bisexual men, proved far less successful.

Simkhai previously suggested the company could boost revenues by selling customer data and elements of its technology, but he insisted Grindr would never sell on users’ personal information.

The tie-up makes perfect sense for Kunlun, according to Paul Armstrong, the founder of the technology advisory firm Here/Forth.

“There’s a lot of research that says games and gaming are popular in the gay community,” he said. “Gaming has an existing and burgeoning area of interest for the demographic and Kunlun will have done their research into that.”

He also warned Grindr not to allow advertising concerns to have too much influence. “Poor advertising is a bad experience regardless of who or where you are. If advertising is poorly executed in apps that contain personal information, like Grindr, it has a high potential to be negatively received by the community.

“Beijing Kunlun Tech and Grindr need to be incredibly careful to make sure they don’t disrupt the user experience.”

In a message to Grindr users, Simkhai said the investment plan was testament to the app’s meteoric rise since its launch in 2009.

Kunlun’s investment was “a huge vote of confidence in our vision to connect gay men to even more of the world around them,” he said.



“For nearly seven years, Grindr has self-funded its growth, and in doing so, we have built the largest network for gay men in the world. We have taken this investment in our company to accelerate our growth, to allow us to expand our services for you.”

He signed off his message to users with a rallying cry of “Grind on”.

Carter McJunkin, Grindr’s chief operating officer, said the company needed a partner to grow faster. Kunlun’s digital knowhow and willingness to let Grindr continue operating as before made it the right company to work with, he told the New York Times.



Zhou Yahui, the billionaire chairman of Kunlun, said: “We have been very impressed by Grindr’s progress to date and are extremely excited about the future of the company. We will continue to seek out and invest in high-quality technology companies led by top-tier management across the globe.”

Simkhai and his employees will continue to own the remaining 40% of Grindr.

Online dating and “hookup” apps are making waves in the financial world, with Match Group, the owner of Tinder, seeking a valuation of £3.1bn in an upcoming stock market float in New York.