The happiness of millions of people around the world depends, in no small part, on how well Jackie Jantos does her job.
“Dating and relationships are top of mind for all of us,” says the chief executive of dating app Hinge. Since its launch more than a decade ago, the app has grown to 12mn monthly active users — according to data from Sensor Tower — and become synonymous with the search for romance. The company says a date is arranged on its platform every two seconds. “This is the most important thing, arguably, in our lives.”
Whether dating apps help people form satisfying romantic partnerships, or have simply shortened their attention spans and commodified romance, is up for debate. But Hinge’s commercial record suggests it is doing something right.
Positioning itself as the platform for people serious about relationships has helped it achieve outlier growth in a sector dogged by shrinking audiences and online-dating fatigue.
Since 2021, Hinge’s monthly active users have more than doubled from 4.8mn to 11.8mn, according to Sensor Tower, while Tinder, the market leader, experienced a decline from 65.4mn to 50.5mn. Profits have followed a similar trajectory: Tinder posted operating income of $832.6mn in 2025, down from $955.5mn in 2023, while Hinge’s rose to $166.3mn from $74.3mn.
The success makes it a star player in Match Group, the sprawling romance conglomerate that owns Tinder as well as Match.com and dozens of other dating apps, and which acquired a majority stake in Hinge in 2018. Match CEO Spencer Rascoff, who joined in February 2025, has set his sights on turning around the company, which still depends largely on the profits brought in by Tinder.
Jantos has played a pivotal role, as Hinge’s chief marketing officer for four years before becoming CEO in December.
The app’s branding has positioned it as a more grown-up dating option, with a tagline and image that prioritise long-term matches and suggest it puts users’ happiness over their status as loyal — and still single — customers. “We talk about Hinge as the app ‘designed to be deleted’ and that is a philosophy that guides how we design our product,” Jantos says. “It’s really when our daters are successful, our business is successful.”
Kathryn Coduto, a researcher at Boston University, says marketing to those looking for serious relationships has been crucial. “Dating apps have gotten a reputation as hook-up apps, and Hinge’s narrative is to push against that. For people who are looking for a serious relationship, Hinge feels much more promising and even authentic.”
The app’s use of “prompts” — short notes that users write on profiles to share their interests and spark conversation — and emphasis on chat over simply responding to photos have also boosted its success, she says. “People appreciate the ability to comment on photos and to engage with Hinge’s conversation prompts over swiping on profiles.”
Hinge is not universally liked by users, however. One gripe is that the app’s algorithm — the opaque pattern by which it suggests “matches” based on shared interests — can fail to offer appropriate matches. Such grievances provoke speculation over whether the algorithm assesses users’ attractiveness, based on factors such as the number of likes they receive, creating a hierarchy of desirability that disadvantages those deemed less appealing.
Does the algorithm rate users’ attractiveness? “No,” Jantos says. “We are trying to find who you might like and who might like you.”
“The algorithm has the information that you have shared with us, it also has the information around the individuals who you’ve liked and it also sees signals around content that you’ve liked . . . it uses all this information essentially to put in front of you people who we think will meet your criteria.”
Jantos says her industry has struggled to keep up with rapidly evolving dating preferences. “In the past decade, many apps in the category haven’t innovated in a way to keep up with the changing dynamic of how people identify, how people are looking for relationships and what sort of relationships they want to be in.”
But she believes her international upbringing in Japan has given her a valuable perspective and appreciation of different cultures, including an openness to be guided by younger audiences.
“I look to Gen Z for inspiration, where conversations around gender are no longer binary,” she says. “What I bring, most importantly, is awareness of what my experience is and what my experience is not . . . You need to be honest and constantly bring other people into the room.”
Prior to joining Hinge in 2021, the 47-year-old cut her teeth at Coca-Cola and then Spotify, where she was pivotal in the launch of “Spotify Wrapped”. The feature has become a regular viral event online as users share their most listened to artists packaged in buzzy charts and memes at the end of each year.
Justin McLeod — Hinge’s founder and previous CEO — looked at this record when hiring Jantos, she says. “He was really excited about my work at Spotify because that work really cemented the brand and culture today. Everything from the logo to the colour green to ‘Wrapped’ — these were my babies, you know?”
Yet taking the helm from McLeod for the brand’s “new chapter” will mean leading differently. “When a founder is running a business, the founder’s voice is always really, really important,” says Jantos. “My style is much more in bringing other voices into the room and distributing the decision making, because now we’re operating at scale and we need to move fast, as a group.”
That also means steering the brand’s identity within a larger organisation, when her experience at Match Group predates that of her boss. “I have an incredible relationship with Spencer [Rascoff],” she says. “Because Hinge has been so successful, because I’ve been at the organisation for four and a half years and this transition from CMO to CEO has been so seamless, Hinge has an incredible amount of autonomy and agency.”
Like Tinder and Bumble, a core component of Hinge’s business model is paying users. Two services, Hinge+ and HingeX, require users to pay for an enhanced version of the app, which gives them additional “likes” — used to show interest in potential matches — and makes their profiles more visible. Revenue per payer on Hinge was $31.97 each month in 2025, up from $29.94 a year prior.
While the number of paying users increased to more than 1.8mn at the end of 2025 from 1.2mn in 2023, Jantos says maintaining the “free experience”, which gives users eight likes a day, was “sacred.”
“I actually don’t think much about how to get people to pay; I think more about how to encourage more people to try Hinge, because quite naturally, if you’re growing your audience over time, there will be a natural selection within that group who decide that the right experience for them [is the paid option].”
To get the most from the app, Jantos says users should lean into authenticity. “I often tell daters, you know, come to Hinge, use the app, be earnest about who you are,” she says. “It’s not TikTok where you’re going to resolve everything you’re looking for . . . you do need to put in a little bit of effort; challenge yourself to have a little bit of resilience along the way.”
Still, she is adopting fresh ideas. Although AI is creating new problems — including bot-generated “chatfishing” messages — it is also the basis for a new tool that gives feedback on prompts. Other experiments include a “direct to date” offer, which would allow users to indicate they prefer to meet in person without messaging beforehand.
The move will put Hinge head to head with fast-growing app Breeze, which only allows users to chat for a few hours before their date. The allure of cutting to the chase helped its monthly active users double to 437,000 last year, according to Sensor Tower.
Jantos is not worried about the competition. “There’s a lot of innovation in the category right now and I love that because I think the category has underserved daters,” she says. “We are at a time where people really are looking for relationships and need more tools in their toolbox in general to find them.”
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