A New Dating App Matches People According to Their Taste in Memes

A dating app called Schmooze has recently popped up on many people’s radars thanks to its unique concept: the users choose their soulmates based on the memes they like. Just imagine meeting people who have the same sense of humor and love the same degen memes as you do. That’s what Schmooze is.

Schmooze was created by Stanford University student Vidya Madhavan, who got this insane idea after she wrote to ten strangers on LinkedIn to help her decide if she should go to a school in California, and one of them started texting her back with memes.

Basically, Schmooze users react to memes with a swipe, just like in Tinder or any other standard dating app. Based on their preferences and considering biographical information and personal interests, the program hooks you up with your perfect meme-mate. You know, like a soulmate but funnier?

There are about 6,000+ memes in the application, and every day hundreds of new ones are added, and the less used ones are deleted. So if you’re a real, hardcore meme lord, you may not find that one obscure meme about the boys looking for beans at 2 AM, but maybe it’s there. There’s only one way to test that.

In the summer of 2020, Schmooze beta tested with 200 Stanford students, and now the app is currently available on iOS and Android with thousands of users swiping right on dead memes. It has been downloaded over 30,000 times in the US. And thanks to the meme generator that is TikTok, they keep getting more and more users every day.

The service has already brought together more than 110k couples of different races, genders, sexualities, and political views during its existence. This means that memes are literally bringing people closer. Even if not all of them actually start texting or going out, it’s still impressive.

It will take time to forge some long-term relationships and prove that the algorithm really works. Nevertheless, even at this stage, the project attracted investors’ attention, and they poured in about $300 thousand from the Ulu Ventures fund and other companies.