Schmooze

About

Schmooze is a dating app that uses memes and machine learning to generate matches between people who share a sense of humor. By showing users a variety of memes that they can swipe left or right on, it determines what they find funny and what they are interested in, then uses that data to match them with somebody who likes the same memes.

History

Schmooze is led by CEO and founder Vidya Madhavan, who came up with the idea after conducting a romance through LinkedIn with the man who is now her husband.^[1] Madhavan attended Stanford Business School and the startup app received its first round of seed money ($270,000) in 2020. Smaller trials with Stanford students showed positive signs.^[2]

The app debuted on Apple's App Store in February 2022, and according to its page, there have been over 500,000 matches made as of August 2022.^[3]

The meme dating app was also notably discussed in a February 2022 episode of the CBS late-night show Late Show With Stephen Colbert (seen below).^[4]

Features

The app asks users to swipe through memes, and gathers data on what they like and dislike for the purpose of matching them with somebody who has similar likes.

Users maintain a more conventional dating app-style profile complete with pictures and information about themselves, which appears when a match is made. Once a match is made, users can choose to schmooze or to snooze the match. The app lets users know which memes paired them with a potential match as well.^[5]

Search Interest

External References