Gen Z dating apps like Ditto ditch swiping in favor of AI matchmaking

Forget swiping. Ditto, founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu, wants Gen Z to stop scrolling through profiles and just show up to a date instead. There's no app to download here — users text an iMessage number, and a chatbot walks them through an onboarding conversation about their name, gender, birth date, personality, and dating preferences. Some people even send photos of celebrity crushes so the AI can get a feel for their type.

The matching logic is the interesting part. Wang says Ditto isn't pairing people based on shared hobbies but on what those hobbies reveal about someone's underlying personality. His example: a guy into rock climbing and skydiving and a girl into hip hop and skateboarding might look unrelated on paper, but both could be adventurous, individualistic types — and that's where the chemistry comes from, according to Wang. Every Wednesday at 7 p.m., matched users get a message with a person, a time, and a location. Show up, go on the date, come back with feedback, and Ditto uses that to refine the next match.

The numbers are modest but telling. Ditto has 150,000 signups, and about 20% of matches actually turn into a date — which, as unglamorous as that sounds, still beats what most people experience on Tinder. The app leans hard into a collage-style visual aesthetic to introduce matches, a look shared by other youth-focused connection apps like Sonder.

Safety is the obvious wrinkle. Cutting out the lag between matching and meeting in person raises real questions about verifying who someone actually is, and for now Ditto's answer is limited: it's only live at a few dozen colleges, relying on .edu email addresses as a built-in vetting layer. Scaling beyond campus life — and beyond college students altogether — while keeping that safety net intact is the harder problem ahead, one that even bigger, better-funded dating apps haven't solved cleanly.

Ditto isn't hurting for attention or cash. The company has raised $9.2 million in seed funding from investors including Gradient, Peak XV, and Scribble, much of it inbound after Ditto built a following on LinkedIn and Twitter — Wang even mentioned Duolingo co-founder Severin Hacker reaching out directly. Now based in San Francisco with twelve full-time employees, Ditto is hiring for an actual job titled Chief Yacht Officer to run promotional parties. The stunts get attention, Wang admits, but he's betting the real retention driver is simpler: a decent first date.