The Tinder Mafia

ivelina

Published

October 10, 2024

In our weekly tech mafia series we cover the biggest tech mafias in Silicon Valley and beyond, taking a closer look at what companies former employees have started, how much money they’ve raised, and who their investors are.

What is a tech mafia group?

Disruptive startups like PayPal have produced a line of ex employees who go on to start their own influential startups. For example, employees who worked at PayPal went on to found companies like LinkedIn and YouTube.

This week we cover the 14 top startups founded by former employees of Tinder, including rising stars.

Quick stats on the Tinder Mafia:‍

Total number of companies founded: 43
Total amount of money raised: $912 million

If you missed our previous posts, make sure to check the Twitter Mafia, Lyft Mafia, Stripe Mafia, Netflix Mafia, InstaCart Mafia, Dropbox Mafia, Revolut Mafia,Tesla Mafia,Square Mafia, Reddit Mafia, VMware Mafia, Amazon Mafia, SpaceX, Slack Mafia, OpenAI,Google Mafia, Pinterest Mafia, Shopify Mafia, Coinbase Mafia, Instagram Mafia, Skype Mafia, Qualcomm Mafia and YouTube Mafia articles.

Investing in fellow coworkers' startups, especially as a community or alumni group, is one of the best ways to get in early on deals as well as support the ideas and ventures of people you love and admire. Who knows what's around the corner in your own network and community!

Companies covered:

Bumble
Rhino
Mantra Health
Bilt Rewards
Luminous Computing
Beam Impact
nVenue
Safara
Arch
Attention
Atlas Privacy
Toolbox
Midnight
Gregarious Inc

Bumble

Founder: Whitney Wolfe Herd
Tinder Role: VP Marketing and co-founder
Capital Raised: $313.5M
Investors: Greycroft
Stage: Public

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, and Fruitz. Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date), friendship (Bumble BFF) and professional networking (Bumble Bizz).

Rhino

Founder: Ankur Jain
Tinder Role: VP, Product
Capital Raised: $140.8M
Investors: FJ Labs
Stage: Series B

Rhino replaces costly security deposits with a low-cost insurance policy to help renters save thousands on move in.

Mantra Health

Founder: Ed Gaussen
Tinder Role: International Growth Manager
Capital Raised: $34.2M
Investors: Canaan Partners
Stage: Series A

Mantra Health is a digital mental health clinic on a mission to improve young peoples' mental healthcare access through clinical services, software, and design.

Bilt Rewards

Founder: Ankur Jain
Tinder Role: VP, Product
Capital Raised: $213.3M
Investors: Fifth Wall Ventures
Stage: Series B

Bilt Rewards is the first-ever rewards program that allows renters to earn points on rent and builds a path towards homeownership.

Luminous Computing

Founder: Marcus Gomez
Tinder Role: Research Scientist
Capital Raised: $115M
Investors: BoxGroup
Stage: Series A

Luminous is building a powerful, scalable AI supercomputer on Earth.

Beam Impact

Founder: Alex (Salvatore) Sadhu
Tinder Role: Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $15.4M
Investors: Index Ventures
Stage: Series A

Beam is on a mission to shift $10B from brands to nonprofits by creating what loyalty would look like if it were designed for today’s customers.

Rising Stars

nVenue

Founder: Drew Williams
Tinder Role: Director of Finance
Capital Raised: $4.6M
Investors: Rogers Healy
Stage: Seed

nVenue’s unmatched technology leverages the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to quickly and accurately generate probabilities and odds for every outcome of a play.

Safara

Founder: Karim Varela
Tinder Role: Director of Engineering
Capital Raised: $7.3M
Investors: Sequoia Capital
Stage: Seed

Safara is reimagining hotel booking from the ground up.

Arch

Founder: Himanshu Sahay
Tinder Role: Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $2.8M
Investors: Global Founders Capital
Stage: Seed

Arch is a financial services company enabling individual investors to maximize their wealth by providing loans against their combined alternative assets.

Attention

Founder: Anis Bennaceur
Tinder Role: Marketing & Growth
Capital Raised: $3.1M
Investors: Eniac Ventures
Stage: Seed

Attention is building the next generation of sales intelligence tools to help businesses achieve their full potential. Their fully-integrated AI-powered sales assistant provides real-time coaching, automatically fills out CRMs after sales calls, and drafts intelligent follow-up emails that pull from conversations.

Atlas Privacy

Founder: Jon Rhome, Chris Young
Tinder Role: Product Manager, Engineering Manager
Capital Raised: $2.1M
Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners
Stage: Seed

Atlas's mission is to give people back control of their personal information.

Toolbox

Founder: Jose Pons Vega
Tinder Role: Android Developer
Capital Raised: $8.6M
Investors: Y Combinator
Stage: Seed

Toolbox helps construction, maintenance and repair contractors with a simple, yet powerful financial operating system to grow their business.

Midnight

Founder: Josh Sell
Tinder Role: Chief Product Officer
Capital Raised: $7.5M
Investors: FJ Labs
Stage: Seed

Josh is the COO and co-founder at Midnight, a company that is on a mission to build Web3 games with “eternal stories” and never-ending experiences that keep players coming back.

Gregarious Inc.

Founder: Alex Ross, Gareth Johnson
Tinder Role: Director of Engineering, Lead Designer
Capital Raised: $5.4M
Investors: First Round Capital
Stage: Seed

Gregarious is changing the way humans live alongside plants. They believe that everyone should understand how plants work and be able to participate in solutions to the existential challenges our planet is facing, from food system insecurity to collapsing ecosystems.