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Dil Mil Raises Another $2.7m In Funding To Disrupt Arranged Marriage Model

The South Asian matchmaking app Dil Mil has just secured another round of funding, taking its total to $3.8m.

The San Francisco-based company has raised $2.7m in pre-series A funding from investors including Nelstone Ventures, Transmedia Capital, Maiden Lane Ventures, CSC Upshot as well as Angel List founder Naval Ravikant, Kunal Shah, Sameer Parwani and Vijay Ullal.

The app was founded in 2014 by KJ Dhaliwal, Jacob Ilin, Sukhmeet Toor and Tom James Holub, to try and disrupt the “broken arranged marriage model” while solving the privacy and quality concerns of current dating solutions.

CEO Dhaliwal has said that 90% of South Asians marry in their own community, so the team wanted to build an app that would widen this dating pool for younger generations.

The app lets you verify your profile using Facebook, LinkedIn & Instagram, and uses a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to find tailored matches for users without requiring them to input a host of personal information.

Targeted towards professional South Asians looking for serious relationships, the app lets you swipe through profiles that only appear for five seconds before disappearing, unless you match with that person.

Like Tinder, Dil Mil lets you purchase a VIP account, giving you premium features like showing your mutual friends and the ability to rewind a swipe.

dil mil

Dil Mil has already made over 1.3m matches, and is apparently averaging three marriages a week.

Back in May 2015, the company raised $1.1m in funding from 500 Startups & Match.com founder Will Bunker.

And with this latest round of $2.7m, the matchmaking app has now secured a total of $3.8m.

The startup plans to use the funding to harness new technologies and expand its product.

Speaking about future plans for the app, Dhaliwal said: “The landscape is always changing and one of our core advantages is our ability to experiment with and harness emerging technologies to enhance human communication.

“Our next step is to expand beyond text and allow users to better understand each other within the app before meeting in real life. We are currently working on facilitating video dates and will be rolling out VR dates shortly thereafter.

“The testing and surveys we’ve conducted indicate that, unlike with other dating apps, Dil Mil users will embrace video and VR technology.”

You can download the app on iOS and Android.

Simon Edmunds

Simon is the former editor of Global Dating Insights. Born in Newcastle, he has an English degree from Queen Mary, London and after working for the NHS, trained as a journalist with the Press Association. Passionate about music, journalism and Newcastle United.

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