Zoosk, the world’s largest social dating community, today announced it has closed a $30 million Series D round of funding. The Series D funding round brings Zoosk’s total financing to $40.5 million. The round was led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners, the oldest venture capital firm in the United States. Existing investors Canaan Partners and ATA Ventures also participated. As part of the funding event, David Cowan, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, joins Zoosk’s Board of Directors.
The funds will support the company’s rapidly growing user base, continued global expansion, marketing activities in key geographies, and investments in new features and applications.
A social dating site raising this level of capital in the current economic climate is a tremendous indicator that the social dating space is energized, growing fast and here to stay.
I’ve stayed in touch with Zoosk and have watched the the company grow by leaps and bounds ever since they launched on Facebook several years ago. Congrats to Alex, Shayan and the rest of the team. Talk about a wild ride.
Phase 1 of Zoosk is now ready to be a case study. The power of the the social graph and viral marketing to lower customer acquisition costs for dating sites significantly has been proven. I can’t wait to see what sort of partnerships, deals and expansion Zoosk embarks on in coming months.
Zoosk and Are You Interested were the first companies to take dating to social networks. Back then, it was much easier to attract more users as they figured out the art of viral loops and the social graph.
Much smaller in size, Thread, Gelato, Are You Interested and the rest of the competition are variations on social dating, each with their own unique value proposition. Their primary challenge is that Facebook has made it more difficult to “go viral”. They can’t get away with the wild west early days of Facebook, where sites could do just about anything to get traffic (ask for forgiveness later.)
To the 20 other companies trying to build a dating site on top of Facebook, remember, less is more. Complicated matching algorithms are great for serious dating, but on social networks, casual dating rules, at least for the time being. The only service I’ve seen that tries to do serious matching on social networks is MatchMatrix, which needs a huge marketing push to get any sort of reasonable traction.
I would expect further investment in the space to occur as investor interest grows and they start funding clones and me-too services.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
With the latest/future changes to the communication/viral chain the value add in building a Facebook app has diminished significantly. It’s close to a point where the funds required to build an app in this space outweighs the ROI. Being in early may have been the only way to go……..congrats to Zoosk and AYI
It’s interesting that we have seen purely social network dating, or purely stand-alone. I think there is opportunity for a hybrid, ie a social network for dating that can use search, display AND social and viral methods to drive signups. @Dan Collard the costs of building apps are decreasing, though I agree maybe not as fast as marketing costs. We’ll see :)
Absolutely. Dating and social network are very similar although they are different. How they are different? Read
http://www.datingsitebuilder.com/difference-between-online-dating-and-social-networking-blog-10.html
Dating and Social Networking sometimes it became one, even if in many points are different. Many many people use for example social network Hi5 as a dating site with a lot of success, but I think that social networks forget what they are: a social network.
Indeed, but not all the people from Social Networking are there for dating proposes but on the dating site the people are there for dating purpose.
i think a lot if not the majority of single 20 somethings are on social networking sites for casual dating, communication has shifted so much towards the net that people are using these types of platforms to learn more about potential partners
I guess day by day the competition for social networking sites is growing faster. It all depends upon the management of the sites to sustain in business. Facebook has crossed 350 million mark recently. And Microsoft has invested $250 million for Facebook Ads.
Finding someone to go out with who understands what it’s like to deal with single parenthood every day can be a huge thing; it gives you common ground to talk about and a common set of responsibilities to keep in mind when planning your dating activities..
So user aquisition is supposidly free, the make 20 to 30 million a year and they have no costs???
So why does one raise $40million than? If you have no expenses how can you spend that?
Does zoosk turn into dating now?