GenY is clearly going social by defying the social norms. Gone are the days when parents spent long hours on matrimonial sites to find a perfect match for their sons and daughters. This generation wants to explore, experiment and express, before tying a nuptial knot. Match-making sites are now giving way to dating apps such as Tinder, TrulyMadly, Matchify, Thrill, Woo, Vee, Desicrush, OK Cupid, Aisle and Waltzz.

Recently, matrimonial site Shaadi.com also entered the space by picking up stakes in a Delhi-based dating app Thrill. This trend has caught the fancy of several investors who feel that change in culture, lifestyle and demography along with higher mobile internet connectivity is swiping youngsters off their feet.

Ritesh Banglani, Partner, Helion Ventures, spoke with Business Line on the growth of the segment and future trends. Helion has invested in TrulyMadly.

What is a dating app and why is it gaining popularity in the Indian market?

Dating apps are the next innovation of dating platform started by the match.com and others in the US in the 90s.

With the advent of the mobile, things became better in this world for which location became a factor and location could be easily determined over the mobile.

The apps not just provides listing but also suggests users with fine curated matches or algorithm determined matches so that you only communicate with people that you liked. The apps help users quickly select the matches. In India, localised dating apps will perform significantly better than global apps as the nature of dating market in India is very different. The most fundamental difference is that the user is looking for serious dating and particularly women.

The current global apps cater to more casual dating based on location and photographs, predominantly.

But Indian user wants a very detailed profile – education, career and income.

Why are VCs interested in the space?

The most fundamental thing is that the demographics of India and changing in the social norms, it’s a large segment and as you know 50 per cent of the Indian population is below the age group of 25. So the next 5-10 years this country is going to be full of singles and finding a partner is one of the most important area in which you spend time and money. So, one is the demographic and second is resistance to arrange marriages.

The trend is towards finding your own partner so that is a combination of a very large market. Change in social norms and technology availability that allows a better matching. All of this together makes it an attractive and a forward looking market.

How big is the market?

Today, dating as a market in India doesn’t even exists, so there is no commercial angle to dating in India, yet.

There is arrange marriage market and there are couple of websites that have traditional match markers online but the dating market is still nascent.

So, we particularly chose TrulyMadly because they are a set of unique entrepreneurs with success lined up and are most likely to create a high value proposition

Do you see consolidation in the matrimonial segment?

No, I think both the markets will continue to exist side by side but we are pretty confident that the growth in the dating market will be much faster than the growth in the matrimonial market. So, it’s not like one market will die or so. India is a very large country and there are multiple models that work at the same time and so it’s not as if traditional arrange matrimony will go away but the trend and the growth is more towards dating than the traditional market.

What is Helion’s strategy going forward?

We will be supporting TrulyMadly with multiple long-term funding. However, there are multiple services to provide here, wedding service aggregation is one space we are quite interested in. There are other smaller kinds of services that can be provided like aggregation of traditional match makers as that is one possibility, background verification as a service that is another possibility but as far as dating apps are concerned TrulyMadly is going to be the one to bet on.

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