After more than a decade as CEO of Hinge, Justin McLeod is stepping down to launch another dating app—with an AI twist.
McLeod started Hinge in 2011 and spent more than a decade at the helm, including after Match Group acquired the company in 2019. The company’s president and chief marketing officer, Jackie Jantos, will take over as CEO.
McLeod’s new dating app, Overtone, plans to use “AI and voice tools to help people connect in a more thoughtful and personal way,” according to a press release. Yet, few further details are known about the venture.
“We’re not going to talk a lot about [Overtone] quite yet,” McLeod told Fast Company, “except to say that there’s an opportunity to completely reimagine the dating experience and how technology can help facilitate people finding their partner—that breaks the mold of the way current dating apps are designed.”
Overtone started as a project within Hinge, but is now spinning off to operate independently. Still, it will continue to have ties to Match Group, which will lead the company’s first funding round in 2026 and plans to hold a “substantial ownership position.” Match CEO Spencer Rascoff will also sit on the board of directors, while McLeod serves as chairman of the board.
Match Group did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The new venture comes as dating apps have struggled to maintain users. A 2024 study from Forbes found more than three quarters of dating-app users experienced some sort of “swipe fatigue,” and many said the burnout they experienced was linked to not being able to make genuine connections.
Some data from the biggest market player, Tinder, dovetails with these sentiments. The app is down more than 1.5 million paying users from its peak in 2022, according to Fast Company. Match Group, which apart from Hinge also owns Tinder, Match.com, and OkCupid, reported a 2% year-over-year revenue increase in its latest quarter, yet Tinder’s paying customers dropped by 7%, according to the Wall Street Journal. To be sure, a bright spot in the company’s third quarter was Hinge, whose paying users increased 17%.
Amid potentially stagnating interest in dating apps, Match Group companies, as well as competitors Bumble and even Facebook Dating, have increasingly turned to AI to try to rekindle users’ interest. Earlier this year, Hinge launched a feature called “prompt feedback” that uses AI to help improve users improve the responses they give to public-facing prompts such as “my happy place.”
Bumble and Tinder have also both added tools that use AI to analyze users’ photos and present the most appealing. Yet, it’s unclear if users are actually looking for more AI in their dating lives. In a study of 1,000 dating app users by Bloomberg Intelligence, nearly 50% of respondents said they didn’t have problems making a dating profile on their own, without AI.
While McLeod’s new project, Overtone, started within Match Group, he said it made more sense for the new dating app to be an independent company so it could move at the fastest possible pace. During his tenure, Hinge grew from less than $1 million in revenue in 2017 to roughly $400 million by 2023. He told Fast Company he was eager for a fresh challenge and to take the reins once more.
“I’m a founder and CEO at heart,” he said. “There’s a piece of me that wants to be out there on my own, ultimately steering the ship again.”
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