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3 sisters who built an 'anti-Tinder' and turned down $30 million from Mark Cuban just launched their dating app in the UK

Jul 10, 2015, 20:37 IST

The Kang sisters, cofounders of Coffee Meet Bagel, appear on 'Shark Tank.'Coffee Meets Bagel/Instagram

Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating app described as the "anti-Tinder" and led by three sisters who turned down a $30 million buyout from Mark Cuban, launched in London on Wednesday.

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The latest entrant to an increasingly crowded scene that includes OKCupid, Hinge, Happn, and of course Tinder, the smartphone app distinguishes itself through a radical focus on the quality of the matches it offers rather the quantity - namely, by offering just one a day.

Every day at noon, users are offered a single match, or "bagel," selected using info inputted by the user. Don't like them? Tough, wait until tomorrow and try again.

It's this hyper-selectivity - the exact opposite of the approach most other dating apps take - that has had it frequently described as the "anti-Tinder." It's an assessment cofounder Dawoon Kang told Business Insider she agrees with "to an extent."

The company doesn't disclose revenue or user numbers, but closed an $8 million Series A funding round earlier in 2015 - and notably turned down a $30 million buy-out offer from Mark Cuban on "Shark Tank" (the American version of "Dragon's Den"). Asked about size, Kang points to 25 million matches, and 15,000 couples (the company knows about) - which admittedly pales in comparison compared to Tinder's 8 billion matches.

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However, Tinder's "quantity over quality" focus is inherently "male-orientated," Kang says. Tinder is so wildly popular precisely because its game-like simplicity moves beyond the typical dating app demographic - but this can leave people with an unsatisfying experience, matching with other people looking for very different things.

Three-years-old and cofounded by Dawoon Kang and her two sisters Arum and Soo, the app is already live across the US, and three other cities - Hong Kong, Sydney, and Toronto. Kang says London is an ideal next step, apparently containing "the highest concentration of singles" of any city in the English-speaking world apart from New York.

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