GRINDR TO BUY HIV-PREVENTION TELEHEALTH PROVIDER FREDDIE FOR $250M $GRND agreed to acquire Freddie parent PurposeMed for $190M in cash and $60M in stock, marking its first major acquisition. Freddie focuses on HIV-prevention telehealth, including access to PrEP, and will be combined with Grindr’s existing Woodwork telehealth business under a new Grindr Health offering. Grindr plans to focus on expanding Freddie in the U.S., where it sees roughly a $240M annual revenue opportunity based on 50,000 patients. The company says the deal should be immediately accretive to EBITDA, though margins could initially be pressured as it invests in growth. PurposeMed could also receive up to another $70M if it hits 2027 performance targets. The deal is expected to close in Q4. Source: WSJ

Grindr CEO @georgearison reveals Match Group's president told him height is by far the top filter on their apps, while on Grindr height barely matters because gay men care about a very different attribute: "My first year at Grindr, I met with the CEO and president of the Match Group. The president who had been at Match for a very long time is like, can you filter based on height? I'm like, I think you can, but I literally had to think very hard about whether you could or not. I don't think most gay men care." "They really don't. I made a joke saying I think there's another item involving size that is way more important on Grindr than height. And the response I got was, wow, on our product, it's literally by far the most important filter, way more than anything else." "That's a very big difference between gay men and straight people." @Grindr @creatine_cycle

Grindr CEO @georgearison on why AI can finally fix dating apps: "If you look at the AI company's landscape, there's actually very little consumer-facing stuff that's being built. It's all enterprise." "For AI to be really good, you need data, and there's very little data that startups can have on the consumer side. Existing companies that have the data, if they were willing to innovate and try new stuff, they could create really unimaginable things. Things that previously were like science fiction." "If you look at a typical dating app profile, most of it's filled out from the perspective of what does the person filling it out think the other people want to see rather than what's actually true about themselves. You're not presenting reality. You're presenting something other than that, which is why so many of the connections that happen then don't go anywhere." "With AI, you can solve that because you can go deep into what a person actually is like based on what they're talking about in all the conversations in your product. Then start recommending people to each other based on what's true in reality versus what might be appearing on the surface layer of the profile." @Grindr @creatine_cycle

Grindr CEO @georgearison calls 996 tyrannical and says it's imported from a tyrannical country, it only exists because founders are shitty at management using time in office as a substitute: "I cannot stand 996. I'm all for hardcore work. I think it's fine to expect people to work 70 hours a week if you're doing a startup. I'm more in the 55-hour range myself." "But 996 is tyrannical. It's imported from a tyrannical country. It's insane to me that people who claim they want to promote capitalism and free society would be replicating it. It basically is saying, I'm shitty at management, and I'm going to use time in office as an alternative to management." "I work easily 70 hours most weeks. But there's no way I could ever work 996 because I stop working at to , and until my kids go to bed at , I don't work." "We have a very hardcore culture at Grindr. We call it Grindr Mode. There's regular mode, and then there's hardcore mode. When we can add a lot of value, we go into hardcore mode. But 996 is awful and I can't stand it." @Grindr @creatine_cycle