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Tinder adds a new home for interactive, social features with launch of Tinder Explore
Tinder is redesigning its app to put a larger emphasis on its social, interactive features with the launch of “Explore,” a new section that will feature events, like the return of the popular “Swipe Night” series, as well as ways to discover matches by interests and dive into quick chats before a match is made. Combined, the changes help to push Tinder further away from its roots as a quick match-based dating app into something that’s more akin to a social network aimed at helping users meet new people.
This shift could resonate better with a younger generation that may feel like traditional online dating has lost its novelty. Today, these users are turning to apps marketing themselves as places to meet new friends, while newcomers to the dating app industry are experimenting with other means of connecting users — such as with short, TikTok-like videos, as in Snack, or even audio, as in SwoonMe. For Tinder, these market shifts may have represented an existential threat to its own business. But instead, the company has doubled down on interactivity as being core to the Tinder experience, and as a means of maintaining its dominant position.
At launch, Tinder Explore will include a handful of existing features alongside a new way to meet people. The latter allows users to connect with others based on interests — like Foodies, Gamers, Music Lovers, Social Causes, Entrepreneurs and more. Over time, more interests will be added, which will allow Tinder members to find someone based on what they’re like, rather than just what they look like.
Image Credits: Tinder
Explore will also be home to Tinder’s “Swipe Night,” the interactive series that launched in 2019 as an in-app “choose your own adventure” story which helped to boost Tinder engagement as it gave users a reason to relaunch the app at a specific time. Tinder hailed “Swipe Night” as a success, saying the feature attracted over 20 million users during its first run and led to a 26% increase in matches. In November, the series will return — this time, with new characters and a new “whodunit”-style storyline. It will now also leverage the “Fast Chat” feature that powers Tinder’s “Hot Takes” experience, which allows unmatched users to chat.
“Hot Takes” will also appear in Tinder Explore, which the company describes as a more low-stakes way to match with other users. As a timer counts down, users who are chatting can choose if they want to match. If the timer expires, they meet someone new — similar to an online version of speed dating. Since launching this summer, millions of Tinder users have tried “Hot Takes,” which is only available from 6 pm to midnight local time.
However, the bigger story about Tinder Explore isn’t just what sort of features it will host now, but what the company has in store for the future. Earlier this year, Tinder parent Match bought the Korean social networking company Hyperconnect for $1.73 billion — its largest acquisition to date. And it’s preparing to use Hyperconnect’s IP to make the online dating experience even more interactive than it is today, having announced plans to add audio and video chat, including group live video, to several of its top dating app properties, Tinder included.
Tinder Explore provides a platform where features like this could later be added — something Tinder hints toward0s, noting that the section is designed to offer users access to “a growing list” of social experiences with “many more to follow.”
“A new generation of daters is asking for more from us in the post-Covid world: more ways to have fun and interact with others virtually and more control over who they meet on Tinder,” said Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone, in a company announcement. “Today’s launch of Explore is a major step in creating a deeper, multi-dimensional, interactive experience for our members that expands the possibilities of Tinder as a platform,” he added.
Tinder Explore began rolling out to major English-speaking markets on Wednesday, September 8, and will be available globally by mid-October.
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What Vimeo’s growth, profits and value tell us about the online video market
The spinout of video platform Vimeo from IAC completed today, with the smaller company now trading as an independent entity under the ticker symbol VMEO.
If you missed the news that the internet conglomerate was spinning out the video service, don’t feel bad; it slipped past many radars. But with the company now trading, with our access to its historical results, and with our minds still enthralled by YouTube’s recent financial performance for Alphabet, it’s worth taking a moment to digest the company’s health.
Let’s answer a few questions: How quickly is Vimeo growing, how profitable is its business, and what can its spinout tell us about the larger video market? Recall that Kaltura, another video-powering company, recently put its IPO back into the pipeline after a small delay during what felt like a snap-freeze of the public markets toward the start of the second quarter.
So the Vimeo debut could impact a possible forthcoming unicorn IPO. With that in mind, let’s dig into the numbers.
Growth
From Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, Vimeo’s revenues expanded from $57 million to $89.4 million, a gain of around 57%. That’s a solid pace of expansion, but not a surprising one considering how much digital video the world consumed during the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact that could have bolstered the company’s recent performance.
Over the same time frame, Vimeo’s gross profit grew from $38.6 million to $64.5 million, a gain of around 67%. As you can infer from faster-rising gross profit than revenue, Vimeo’s gross margins improved during Q1 2021 compared to the first quarter of 2020, from 68% to 72%.
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IAC’s NurseFly rebrands to Vivian Health as it expands its healthcare jobs marketplace
NurseFly, the healthcare jobs marketplace owned by IAC, has rebranded to Vivian Health as it expands its range of services. Originally launched for traveling nurses (or nurses willing to travel for short-term positions), Vivian Health now includes listings for permanent positions, per diem shifts and local openings. It also added employer reviews and a pay database that uses information gathered from the 1.7 million jobs that have come through its system.
Founded in 2017, NurseFly was acquired by IAC in August 2019. It is used by providers like AMN Healthcare, Cross Country Healthcare, Host Healthcare, Trinity Health, SSM Health and Honor Health. During the pandemic, Vivian Health quadrupled its employee headcount in order to meet demand, founder and chief executive officer Parth Bhakta told TechCrunch in an email.
“Over the past year, we’ve grown to fill nearly 10% of all travel nursing positions across the United States, oftentimes helping fill a crisis position in a matter of hours rather than weeks,” Bhakta said. During that time, the platform heard from major health systems “that their challenges around hiring for permanent roles were oftentimes even more dire than filling their travel positions,” he added. “Permanent roles at health systems were taking months to fill, costing tens of thousands of dollars to hire, and leading to short-staffed facilities in the meantime.”
As a result of these conversations, Vivian Health’s team spent three months rebuilding the platform to serve a wider range of healthcare providers and employers. Its rebranding and expansion comes at a time when many healthcare professionals are reporting burnout as a result of the pandemic.
In a study of 1,300 respondents published earlier this month, Vivian Health found that 83% said their mental health had been affected by working in healthcare over the past year. About 43% said they had considered quitting the profession.
One of the main reasons for burnout is working overtime, with 86% of their respondents reporting that their facilities are short-staffed, even as demand for healthcare professionals accelerates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 17.3 million people were employed in the healthcare sector in 2018, and that number is expected to increase 15% to 19.9 million by 2028, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors.
“Crisis-level staffing shortages” are compounded by the amount of time, sometimes up to 120 days, it can take to hire a permanent employee. Shortening the amount of time it takes to fill positions has a ripple effect because clinicians need to work less overtime. Meanwhile, recruiters can focus on the right leads. Bhakta said employers have been able to use Vivian Health to fill permanent positions in as little as one week, and are typically able to do so within 30 days.
Vivian Heath built a proprietary data set of healthcare industry information through the 1.7 million jobs that have come through its systems and asks all of its staffing agency partners to include pay rates in their listings. As a result, job seekers are able to see how a position’s compensation compares against the market, while employers can quickly adjust their rates to be more competitive.
Bhakta said Vivian Health added pay information because “our business is built on transparency, which we believe is a crucial element in solving the healthcare hiring crisis.”
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IAC’s Teltech acquired encrypted mobile messaging app Confide
IAC has acquired Confide, the encrypted mobile messaging that once made headlines for its use by White House staffers during the Trump administration. The deal, which closed on Dec. 1, 2020 but was not publicly announced, sees Confide joining Teltech, the makers of spam call-busting app Robokiller, which itself had joined IAC’s Mosaic Group by way of a 2018 acquisition.
Teltech confirmed the Confide acquisition, but declined to share the deal terms. The confidential mobile messaging app had raised just $3.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase data, and had been valued between $10 to $50 million, as a result. (Pitchbook put the valuation at ~$14 million around the same time.)
According to Teltech, the deal was for the Confide IP and technology, but not the team.
The company believes Confide makes for a good fit among its growing group of mobile communication apps, including Robokiller and its latest app, SwitchUp, which offers users a second phone number for additional privacy and spam blocking purposes. Other Teletech apps include phone call recorder TapeACall and blocked call unmasker TrapCall.
Confide, however, may end up being one of the better-known additions among that group, thanks to being remembered as a favored tool of choice among frustrated Washington Republicans during the Trump years.
But despite the user growth that news had driven, things slowed in the months that followed, when researchers published a report that claimed Confide wasn’t as secure as it had promised. Confide quickly fixed its vulnerabilities but then a month later was facing a class action lawsuit (later dismissed by the plaintiff) over the security issues.
Teltech says it was aware of the security concerns, but it had conversations with the prior Confide team and understands that the earlier issues had been “quickly and effectively remediated.”
While IAC won’t speak to its specific plans for Confide’s future, the app will continue to offer users a safe and secure way to communicate. What it won’t do, though, is try to directly compete with Telegram or other private apps that offer large channels or group chats that support tens of thousands of people at once.
“I think one kind of key differentiators is that Confide is definitely more for one-on-one and smaller group communication, rather than with Signal and Telegram where there’s some larger chat dynamics,” notes Giulia Porter, Teltech’s VP of Marketing. “One thing that makes us a little bit different is just that we’re more personal,” she says.
Despite having hit some bumps in the road over the years, Confide as of the time of the acquisition, still had around 100,000 monthly active users. There’s now a team of around 10 assigned to work on the app, adding needed resources to its further development, and soon, an updated logo and branding.
Confide’s existing desktop and mobile apps will also continue to be available, but later updated with new features as part of Teltech’s efforts.
Investors and IAC alike have declined to talk about deal price, but that may speak for itself.
“With the absolute explosion in privacy over the past several years, Confide, which started as a side project, has become a mission-critical platform for sensitive communication throughout the world,” said Confide co-founder and President Jon Brod, in a statement shared with TechCrunch about Confide’s exit.
“We’re thrilled that IAC shares our passion for secure communication and recognizes the unique business we have built. IAC has a proven track record of providing fast-growing companies with the support to reach their full potential and we are excited to see IAC take Confide to the next level,” he said.
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IAC plans to spin off Vimeo as an independent company
IAC announced today that it plans to turn Vimeo into an independent, publicly traded company.
Last month, IAC CEO Joey Levin wrote a letter to shareholders in which he said the holding company had “begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to our shareholders.” It sounds like the company has moved beyond the contemplation phase, with plans that will be submitted for stockholder approval in the first quarter of 2021, and the actual spin off happening in Q2.
“The combination of Vimeo’s remarkable growth, solid leadership position and enormous market opportunity have made clear its future,” Levin said in a statement today. “It’s time for Vimeo to spread its wings and become a great independent public company.”
While Vimeo once competed with YouTube as a consumer video destination, its strategy has shifted in recent years to providing video tools for businesses. In November, the company said it had 1.5 million paying subscribers and 3,500 enterprise clients — and that its most recent quarter was with positive EBITDA, plus year-over-year revenue growth of 44%.
The announcement notes that this is the eleventh company that IAC has spun off, a process in which it distributes its ownership stake to IAC shareholders. (Match Group completed its separation from IAC over the summer.)
“Today we have a rare opportunity to help every team and organization in the world integrate video throughout their operations, across all the ways they communicate and collaborate,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud in a statement. “Our all-in-one solution radically lowers the barriers of time, cost and complexity that previously made professional-quality video unattainable. We’re ready for this next chapter and focused on making video far easier and more effective than ever before.”
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Vimeo raises $150M, while IAC is ‘contemplating’ a spin-off
Vimeo has raised $150 million in new equity funding, announced in conjunction with the third quarter earnings of its parent company IAC.
In a letter to shareholders, IAC CEO Joey Levin said the company has “begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to our shareholders.”
“Given Vimeo’s success, and investor adulation for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) category generally, we expect Vimeo’s access to capital inside of IAC will be much more expensive than access to capital outside of IAC, and that capital will be helpful to enable Vimeo to achieve its highest ambitions,” Levin continued, adding, “We just tested Vimeo’s ability to access capital with a small private fundraise to bolster Vimeo’s balance sheet and to repay capital to IAC.”
Over the summer, Match Group (which owns a variety of dating services, including Tinder) completed its separation from IAC, with IAC’s ownership distributed to IAC shareholders.
Vimeo, meanwhile, has shifted its focus over the past couple years — instead of trying to compete with YouTube as a consumer video destination, it sells video tools to enterprises and other businesses. For example, it recently launched a free video messaging product called Vimeo Record.
The company says it has 1.5 million paying subscribers and more than 3,500 enterprise clients, including Amazon, Starbucks, Deloitte, Zendesk, Rite Aid and Siemens.
The new funding comes from Thrive Capital and GIC. According to the earnings report, in Q3, Vimeo grew revenue by 44% year-over-year, to $75.1 million. And it had its first quarter of positive EBITDA — $3.4 million.
“Our goal is to radically simplify how businesses create and share video, with tools that are far more intuitive and cost-effective than they’ve been historically,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud in a statement. “We’re energized to access additional capital to pursue this enormous opportunity with the full focus and scale of the Vimeo platform.”
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Match Group completes separation from IAC, new board includes Wendi Murdoch and Ryan Reynolds
IAC and Match Group announced that they have completed a “full separation.”
Previously, Match Group (which owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and Match itself) was a publicly traded company, with digital holding company IAC as its majority shareholder. Last year, the companies announced a plan that would see IAC’s ownership of Match distributed to IAC’s shareholders — a plan that is complete as of this morning.
The separation also involves a leadership change, with Mark Stein and Gregg Winiarski stepping down from the Match Group board. The company has four new board members: ExecOnline CEO Stephen Bailey, the NBA’s executive president for digital media Melissa Brenner, investor and entrepreneur Wendi Murdoch and actor Ryan Reynolds (also an owner of Aviation American Gin and Mint Mobile).
“Most millennials and Gen Z can’t remember what dating was like before the advent of Tinder, OkCupid and Hinge,” Reynolds said in a statement. “These brands have enormous responsibility and opportunities to affect societies, all while embracing new technologies and remaining at the forefront of pop culture. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and work with the team on their future growth and success.”
Shar Dubey will continue to serve as Match Group’s CEO, a position she took at the beginning of this year, while Joey Levin remains a both IAC’s CEO and Match Group’s executive chairman.
“This is just the largest transaction at the core of our strategy throughout these 25 years,” said IAC Chairman Barry Diller in a statement. “Be opportunistic, be balance sheet conservative, build up enterprises and when they deserve independence let them have it. Be a conglomerate and an anti-conglomerate, a business model that has been unique to us.”
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Facebook to launch ‘virtual dating’ over Messenger for Facebook Dating users
Facebook will soon allow users to go on “virtual dates,” the company announced today. The social network is planning to introduce a new video calling feature that will allow users of its Facebook Dating service to connect and video call over Messenger, as an alternative to going on a real-world date. This sort of feature is much in demand amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced people to stay home and practice social distancing.
But for online dating apps, which aim to connect people in the real world, it’s a significant challenge for their business.
For the time being, government lockdowns have limited the places where online daters could meet up for their first date. Restaurants, malls, bars and other retail establishments are closed across regions impacted by the coronavirus outbreak. But even when those restrictions lift, many online dating app users will be wary of meeting up with strangers for those first-time, getting-to-know-you dates. Video chat offers a safer option to explore potential connections with their matches.
When the new Facebook Dating feature goes live, online daters will be able to invite a match to a virtual date. The recipient can either choose to accept or decline the offer via a pop-up that appears.
If they accept, the Facebook Dating users will be connected in a video chat powered by Facebook Messenger in order to get to know one another.
As the feature is still being developed, Facebook declined to share more specific details about how it will work, in terms of privacy and security features.
Facebook is not the first online dating service to pivot to video as a result of the pandemic. But many rival dating apps were adopting video features well before the coronavirus struck, as well.
Bumble, for example, has offered voice and video calling in its app for roughly a year. The feature there works like a normal phone call or Apple’s FaceTime. However, users don’t have to share their phone number or other private information, like an email address, which makes it safer.
The company says use of the feature has spiked over the last two months as users embrace virtual dating.
Meanwhile, Match Group has more recently rolled out video across a number of the dating apps it operates.
This month, the Match app added video chat that allows users who have already matched to connect over video calls. Match-owned Hinge also rolled out a “Dating from Home” prompt and is preparing its own live video date feature, as well, Match says. Plenty of Fish (PoF), another Match property, launched live-streaming in March, giving singles a new way to hang out with friends and potential matches.
Match Group’s flagship app Tinder has not yet embraced live video dates, but still offers a way for users to add video to their profiles. The company couldn’t comment on whether or not video dating was in the works for Tinder, but in the post-COVID era, it would be almost bizarre to not offer such feature.
Other dating apps have also launched video dating, including eHarmony and a number of lesser-known dating apps hoping to now gain traction for their video dating concepts.
Facebook says the feature will roll out in the months ahead and will be available everywhere Facebook Dating is available.
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Bluecrew launches a mobile app to help businesses manage a flexible workforce
Bluecrew, a flexible staffing business owned by holding company IAC, is launching a new mobile app called Bluecrew Manager.
Rather than relying on a network of independent contractors, Bluecrew hires its own W-2 employees, who in turn have the option to accept hourly jobs from Bluecrew customers.
The company already offered web-based management tools for those customers, but CEO Adam Roston said the mobile app is designed to help them accomplish “the stuff you need to do right now, while you’re on-the-go.”
For example, he said that a warehouse manager spends most of their day “running around the floor,” so if they’re visiting the pick-and-pack department and need to see who’s on the team that day, they can open the app and see pictures of everyone who’s supposed to be working. And if they see that someone forgot to check in, they can adjust their time clock directly from the app.
Other features include the ability to request more workers and to “favorite” a worker, making it more likely that they’ll be assigned to the same company for future jobs.
Bluecrew says it has been testing out the Manager app (which is available for free to all customers) for the past month. In the launch announcement, Eduardo Medrano, cafe manager at hospitality company Eurest, said the app “is completely changing how I approach staffing” because it allows him “to make adjustments and check who will be there right on my phone.”
The company says that since its acquisition by IAC in 2018, its client base has nearly quadrupled, with growth in industries like logistics and manufacturing, hospitality/culinary and warehousing.
Roston also pointed to California’s new AB-5 law (which limits the ways that companies can classify workers as independent contractors) as a sign that Bluecrew has taken the right approach to combining flexibility and worker protections.
“When [co-founder and CTO Gino Rooney] started the company five years ago, it seemed a little bit crazy to be doing this with W-2 employees,” Roston said. “Over the last year. the landscape has just shifted … The reality, is most companies in the country are already following labor laws and have been at W-2 for years. But we’ve seen some increased momentum from AB-5, and we would expect to see it elsewhere.”
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Newly rebranded Thimble raises $22M to bring flexible insurance to the gig economy
Thimble, which offers flexible, short-term insurance to small businesses and freelancers, is announcing that it has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by IAC.
Until today, the startup was known as Verifly, a name tied to the company’s initial aim of providing insurance to drone pilots. However, founder and CEO Jay Bregman (who previously founded ridesharing company Hailo) said that thanks to customer demand, the team kept adding insurance for different types of businesses — and now it’s rebranding to reflect that broader vision.
While it’s easy to talk about Thimble customers as being part of the “gig economy,” Bregman noted that these aren’t just people driving for Uber or delivering for Postmates — only 4% of the company’s customers identify as gig economy workers.
“There is this larger thing called the gig economy: People working in flexible ways, on their own terms,” he said.
In fact, Thimble now says it provides liability coverage for customers in more than 100 professions, including handymen, landscapers, DJs, musicians, beauticians and dog walkers. Policies can be purchased directly from the Thimble website or app by the hour, day, week, month or year.
The idea, Bregman said, is that as work becomes shorter term and “more transactional,” it doesn’t make sense to buy an annual insurance policy. To illustrate that point, he noted that 75% of customers didn’t have insurance before buying from Thimble, and that 50% of customers are buying policies to cover a single day or less. And the company says it’s on track to sell 100,000 by the end of the year.
Thimble’s policies are underwritten by Markel, an insurance company that Bregman praised for its “infrastructure and talent.”
At the same time, he said, “We have always been the owner of the product itself. Basically, we worked with carrier partners to bring [our products] to market; the way we do that may evolve slightly as we get older and more mature.”
Thimble has received regulatory approval to sell insurance in 48 states so far. Asked whether the broader political debates about whether gig workers are employees could affect the company’s business, Bregman pointed again to the fact that the vast majority of Thimble customers don’t consider themselves gig workers.
“Our only fear here is that in trying to solve a very particular problem with long-term gig employment, that some of these laws may actually unintentionally scare off or capture legitimate freelancers,” he said.
As for the investment, IAC’s chief strategy officer Mark Stein acknowledged that the digital media holding company doesn’t make many early-stage, minority investments. But he said that deals like this are about “planting seeds.”
“What we think about at IAC is: How can we go about planting seeds of growth for the future? What will become the next ANGI Homeservices? What will become the next Match Group?” Stein said, alluding to two IAC-owned businesses that may get spun off. “We need to find these kinds of large, addressable market opportunities now in the hopes of creating very large, industry-changing companies in the future.”
Previous investors Slow Ventures, AXA Venture Partners and Open Ocean also participated in the round, bringing Thimble’s total funding to $29 million.
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