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Tinder co-founder Dinesh Moorjani joins Indian mobile dating firm Vee as advisor

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One of the early investors and co-founder of Tinder, Dinesh Moorjani has joined Noida-based mobile-based dating venture Vee as advisor. Vee is run by GetVee Technologies Pvt Ltd, headed by Nitin Gupta, founder of Coinjoos, an e-commerce platform that was acquired by HomeShop18.com in 2011.

Moorjani is founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile technology incubator and captive fund, which built over 10 startups from ground up since 2010, including Tinder. Moorjani was formerly SVP of IAC Mobile (InterActiveCorp) where he built Hatch Labs.

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The now popular location-based social discovery app Tinder was incubated at Hatch Labs where Moorjani worked closely with Sean Rad, the current CEO, on conceptualising, designing and bringing the product out in the market. He was also one of the co-investors in Tinder in its early days. Moorjani closed Hatch Labs' startup and investment operations in 2013 to operate independently. Currently, he serves as executive-in-residence at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm that has invested more than $50 billion in over 720 companies globally.

"Dinesh was bullish about the Indian market and was closely watching the social-economic changes in India. He was excited about how the social discovery element is shaping up in India. He discovered Vee through a common connection. We also evaluated the synergy and experience he can bring on to the table," said Nitin Gupta, founder and CEO of GetVee.

Founded in April this year, Vee connects single people with others based on their interests. The app also works on a location based search algorithm whereby it helps users find people they may like around their area. Essentially, Vee helps single adults find likeminded people in the surrounding locality and get into relationships.

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Moorjani will be working closely with Gupta on developing strategic initiatives around user acquisition, design and process. Commenting on Dinesh's terms of involvement, Gupta said his role will evolve, but refused to reveal other details about his compensation or shares in the company. "Dinesh's interest was more on getting associated with an Indian company rather than compensatory," he said.

The company claims it is close to crossing half a million app downloads, recorded 40 million interactions, created half a million matches so far and about 6.5-7 million messages have been exchanged on the platform. "Of all the registered users, at least 40 per cent are active users and on an average, we see 10 sessions per user a day. An active user spends around 20-25 minutes on Vee per day," Nitin said.

A free app, Vee is currently available on Android as well as iOS platforms. The company was contemplating on monetising the app with a premium paid subscription model, but Gupta says the focus now is to grow user acquisition and the paid subscription model might come a few years down the line. The app already has the concept of virtual currency incorporated wherein users can unlock the profiles of people who liked them. Vee is also planning to introduce a couple of demographic-based in-app monetisation models in addition to opening up the platform for mobile ads for businesses.

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GetVee had raised $1 million in its pre-Series A round of funding from Lightspeed Venture​ ​Partners in November 2014.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)


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