If you’ve ever looked for love on a dating app and wished someone else was doing it for you, congratulations: you’ve invented 2025. We’re already asking AI what to eat, what to binge, and how to respond to a text. Of course, the next frontier was, “Hey robot, just find me my soulmate and put him in front of me so I can stop swiping.”
That’s the basic pitch behind Keeper, an AI matchmaking startup that says it’s not here to waste anyone’s time. “We actually know who could be your soulmate or not,” CEO Jake Kozloski told Business Insider. “We’re not going to pretend that a hundred thousand of these people could be. We’ll tell you no.”
Investors seem to be into that energy. Keeper, founded in 2022, quietly raised a $4 million pre-seed round in October 2024, led by Lightbank and Lakehouse Ventures, with Goodwater Capital and Champion Hill Ventures also buying into the dream. The sell is that online dating is broken enough, and AI has gotten so smart (read: terrifying) that there’s room for something more extreme than wittier prompts and “see who liked you first” features. Kozloski markets this, knowing that dating apps have terrible user satisfaction, people are exhausted, and an algorithm trained to hunt one long-term partner instead of infinite flings might be the reset.
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What It’s Like to Be on Keeper
Using Keeper starts less like signing up for Tinder and more like filling out a grad school application. You don’t just plug in age, height, and a couple of Hinge-style one-liners; you’re asked about test scores, career goals, salary, net worth, relationship philosophy, and a whole “how do you see love” essay question set. Then, crucially, you don’t even write your own profile. Keeper takes all that data and auto-generates one for you.
On the backend, the matching happens in layers. First, more traditional filtering narrows the pool based on basics like age range and location. Once you’re down to a smaller universe of possibilities, that’s when the magic happens. Kozloski says Keeper’s AI, trained with input from Stanford evolutionary scientists and psychometric experts, sifts through the top candidates to figure out who actually makes sense as a long-term match, not just “both like dogs and tacos.” The idea is that the system learns from real-world outcomes and gets better over time at predicting which pairs end up in serious relationships.
It’s not totally hands-off just yet. Keeper still keeps humans in the loop, with matchmakers reviewing what the AI suggests, sanity-checking the pairing, and then introducing matches via text. According to the company, there have been more than 1.5 million sign-ups, and about 300,000 people have gone all the way through to full accounts. In its beta phase, Keeper claims that roughly one in ten first dates arranged through the platform led to marriage or engagement—an absolutely wild statistic if it holds at scale.
How Much Is Keeper?
Then there’s the price tag, which is less than subtle. Women can use Keeper for free. Men, on the other hand, sign what the company calls a “marriage bounty”: typically around $50,000 if they end up getting married through the service. On top of that, they pay per date, with those date fees counting toward the total. It’s basically a high-stakes, outcome-based matchmaking contract dressed up as an app. The logic is that Keeper only wins if you do; the more serious you are, the more you’re willing to pay for the allegedly higher odds.
It’s definitely an appealing approach for some people and far too wallet-emptying for others. But it’s also not for everyone in a more literal sense. Right now, Keeper is only matching heterosexual couples. Kozloski has said they’d need a separate algorithm to handle queer relationships and that the company wants to nail product-market fit with its “core product” first. Which, translated, means straight people are the test case, and everyone else is on the waitlist for version who-knows-when. For a platform claiming it wants to “address loneliness at a global scale,” that’s a pretty narrow slice of the globe.
The whole thing sits in this weird. On one hand, the idea of an AI “matchmaker that understands you better than you understand yourself” (Kozloski’s own phrasing) sounds like a line straight out of “Black Mirror.” On the other hand, most of us are already outsourcing self-knowledge to algorithms across various platforms anyway. Whether that’s comforting or creepy depends on how you feel about choice. Traditional apps sell you an endless buffet of people and then abandon you to your thumbs. Keeper is trying to be the opposite with fewer profiles, more judgment, and less ambiguity about what you’re here for. It’s not trying to make dating “fun” so much as make it efficient and high-intent for the people willing to pay for that privilege.
For now, Keeper is another sign that the era of casual, infinite swiping is running on fumes. People are exhausted, AI is very good at pattern-matching, and the industry is racing to figure out how to combine those two facts. Whether your “last first date” comes from a souped-up algorithm or the same messy app you’ve been deleting and re-downloading for years, it’s pretty clear that AI isn’t just watching your love life anymore; it’s trying to cast itself as your matchmaker.
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