An artificial intelligence-powered matchmaking platform called Betterhalf.ai has reportedly secured funds amounting to $500,000 (around Rs 3.7 crore) from angel investors including former Google India managing director Shailesh Rao and Flipkart’s former investment director Vinay Subramanian.
Along with these, the other backers that participated in the round included early-stage investor FirstPenguin Capital’s Rehan A Khan and senior executives from Google, Uber and Amazon.
The company is planning to use these fresh funds in the further enhancing of its AI capabilities while continuing to invest in technology and talent.
With this funding round, the company so far has raised about $750,000. It competes with other players in the market such as Tinder and Woo.
Betterhalf was founded in 2016 by Pawan Gupta and Rahul Namdev who are Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alumni. The company makes use of AI to help professionals find each other through compatibility scores that are based on multiple relationship dimensions and their interactions on the product.
Batterhalf claims to leverage AI based on relationship data of couples globally and offer a combination of a personalized experience, a targeted subset of matches, and quick turnaround time to find compatible and perfect partners.
According to a stock-exchange filing by matchmaking portal Matrimony.com that cites a KPMG report, the unmarried population of India stood at 107 million in 2016.
Many of the dating apps have received venture capital funding in recent times.
In October last year, NearGroup Inc. raised $1.6 million (Rs 10 crore) in seed funding led by Finland-based early-stage venture capital firm OpenOcean. During the same time, Inclov, a matchmaking app for the differently-abled, raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding round from a clutch of investors.