CEO Sean Rad Says Dating App Tinder Has Made 1 Billion Matches

Tinder is announcing that it has made 1 billion matches between its users.

As most (all?) of you know, Tinder works by giving users a stack of potential matches and allowing them to swipe right or left to show their interest. If two users express mutual interest, then the app will connect them, allowing them to send each other messages — those are the matches that Tinder is counting.

The company isn’t disclosing how many registered or active users it has, so it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples connection to other apps. What this illustrates, according to co-founder and CEO Sean Rad, is, “Tinder is here to stay. Tinder is absolutely solving a … core human issue that people have with social discovery.”

If you want some sense of how quickly Tinder has grown, well, when we first covered the IAC-backed startup in January of last year, it said it had made 1 million matches, and the number was 500 million in December.

Rad added that the number of connections made per user is on the rise, something he attributes to the team “constantly improving our recommendation engine — we’re increasingly better at suggesting people that we think you’d be interested in knowing.”

He also confirmed yesterday’s report that Tinder would be adding verification to celebrity profiles, although he said, “We haven’t fully rolled it out yet.” He explained the feature by saying the team is “committed to the authenticity of our ecosystem.”

Tinder told me that Rad was scheduled to make the announcement a few minutes ago in an interview on CNBC (though I don’t have a TV on in front of me).

Rad also appeared at our Crunchies award ceremony last month, where he noted that the app is becoming more age diverse (with 18-24 year-olds making up 50 percent of the total user base), and he hinted at plans to move beyond dating by connecting people non-romantically as well.