Rivet launches nationwide introducing a new approach to dating: Social Matching

PR Newswire

NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2026

Founded by former Tinder and Match Group exec Taru Kapoor, Rivet brings people and community back into dating

NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Rivet, a new dating network, today launches nationwide across the United States. Founded by former Tinder and Match Group executive Taru Kapoor, Rivet introduces Social Matching, a model that lets people help each other find meaningful connections and love.

Rivet Matching Screen

Rivet’s Social Matching harnesses the collective intuition of people with different perspectives to surface introductions that people might swipe past on conventional dating apps. The company has raised $10.5 million in seed funding, backed by Peak XV Partners, Shine Capital and Blume Ventures, to build and scale their innovative people-powered approach to dating.

Users can join Rivet not just to find connections for themselves but also to help others find love. As a Matcher, one weighs in on potential pairs and recommends introductions one thinks could work. The pairs who get high Social Matching scores are introduced to each other, and each individual independently decides whether they want to match with someone and begin a conversation. Rivet is for everyone, even if you’re not currently dating, you can join as a Matcher and can help someone else find love and meaningful connections.

In a national survey of 2,013 U.S. adults commissioned by Rivet*, more than two-thirds (68%) of Gen Z and Millennials surveyed said they would be interested in helping someone they don’t personally know find a potential romantic match, if they could do so anonymously and the person made the final decision, including 78% of Gen Z and 60% of Millennials. When asked what would make them interested in helping someone else find a romantic match, the top motivations were helping someone find love (36%) and helping someone avoid a bad match (27%).

“Dating has always been social,” said Taru Kapoor, Founder and CEO of Rivet. “I spent many years thinking what we were building was removing friction from meeting people. Instead, we removed the people. Online dating apps created millions of connections in the last decade, mostly because they expanded the pool, connecting people to those they wouldn’t have met otherwise. A huge side effect of that was that they turned something as fundamentally social and human as dating into a lonely, overwhelming activity which felt transactional and isolating.

I built Rivet to change that. Rivet is built on a simple truth: humans understand chemistry and compatibility in a way that no algorithm can. You don’t have to find your person entirely on your own, let people help you find your person.”

Rivet’s model is built around a give-to-get philosophy as Matchers help each other find meaningful connections, creating a community where people can play an active role in each other’s love stories. “Social matching takes the best of human intuition and judgment and uses it to bring people together. It’s not a feature, it’s the entire point of the platform. Matchers win when two people actually match, which is what single daters want instead of endless swiping. It’s win-win,” said Kapoor.

Elie Seidman, former CEO of Tinder and OkCupid, and an early investor in Rivet, who advised and mentored Kapoor throughout Rivet’s development, said, “The swipe was one of the defining product innovations in online dating because it changed the fundamental way people discovered each other. For the first time since the swipe, the category has something genuinely new: human judgment and a real social community built on the foundation of state-of-the-art technology, working at scale. That is what turns a dating app into a dating network, and it is a powerful, category defining shift.”

Rivet is free to download on iOS and Android.

About Rivet

Founded in 2025 by Taru Kapoor, who spent nearly a decade building and scaling Tinder and other Match Group brands across the U.S., Europe and Asia, Rivet is a Social Matching and dating network built around the belief that human intuition can recognize chemistry in ways algorithms cannot. Rivet’s Social Matching model brings community into the dating experience, with Matchers vibe-checking potential pairs before introducing matches. The individual always makes the final decision on whether to view and match with an Introduction. Anyone can join Rivet purely as a Matcher to help people find their person. Rivet launched nationally in the U.S. in September 2026 and is a product of MeantToBe, Inc., based in New York. Learn more at rivetdating.com, and connect with the brand on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Note:

**Research was conducted by Censuswide among 2,013 US nationally representative general consumers between 15.09.2026-18.09.2026. Censuswide is a member of the Market Research Society and the British Polling Council, and a signatory of the Global Data Quality Pledge.