Former Tinder Executive Taru Kapoor's Rivet Raises $10.5 Million From Peak XV to Let Friends Play Matchmaker in the US

A decade after the swipe transformed how people meet, one of the executives who helped build that model in India is betting that the next phase of online dating will put people back at the centre of the process.

Rivet, a dating platform co-founded by former Tinder and Match Group executive Taru Kapoor, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding from Peak XV Partners, Shine Capital and Blume Ventures. Elie Seidman, the former chief executive of Tinder and OkCupid, is an early investor, adviser and mentor to the company. The round, reported by Inc42 on September 25, is one of the larger seed cheques for a consumer internet start-up with Indian founders this year.

The capital will be used for product development, distribution and scaling in the United States, where Rivet has announced a nationwide launch. The company was founded in 2025 by Kapoor and Rajat Sahni, who previously ran the used-car business at CarDekho. It has offices in the Delhi NCR region while focusing its operations on the American market.

The problem Rivet wants to solve

The pitch begins with a critique of the industry Kapoor helped build. She spent nearly ten years at Tinder and Match Group, where she led the company's business in India. Speaking to Inc. magazine, she was blunt about what she believes went wrong.

"I spent many years working in online dating, thinking what we were building was removing friction from meeting people," she said. "Instead, we removed the people."

Her argument, shared by a growing number of users and researchers, is that dating apps widened the pool of potential partners but made the experience feel transactional and isolating. Endless swiping, low-effort messages and the absence of any social context have contributed to what many in the industry call "dating app fatigue". Established players including Tinder, Bumble and Hinge have spent the past two years redesigning products and experimenting with artificial intelligence features to win back disengaged users.

How "social matching" works

Rivet's answer is to bring friends, acquaintances and even strangers back into the process, in a structured and consent-based way. The company calls this "social matching".

On Rivet, users act as matchmakers first and daters second. Members can join as "matchers" who assess whether two people might be compatible and recommend an introduction. Each recommendation feeds into a social matching score. When a pair reaches a high enough score, both people are introduced, and each decides independently whether to connect.

A distinctive feature is that participants do not need to be single. People who are married, in a relationship or simply not interested in dating can join purely as matchmakers. That design is intended to widen the network well beyond the pool of active daters, and to recreate the role that friends, family and colleagues have traditionally played in bringing couples together.

Kapoor describes the underlying idea in simple terms: on Rivet, she told Inc., "real people help each other find meaningful connections and love." Referring to the isolation she believes modern dating apps created, she added: "I built Rivet to change that."

Researchers who study online relationships see logic in the approach. Kathryn D. Coduto of Boston University told Inc. that "having someone else recommend or vouch for a potential match could have a lot of impact." Social proof, the idea that a trusted third party has endorsed someone, is a powerful signal that conventional swipe-based apps have largely ignored.

Why investors are backing it

For Peak XV, Shine Capital and Blume, the investment is a bet on a founder who knows the economics of dating apps from the inside, and on a product that tries to change user behaviour rather than add features to an old format.

Dating is one of the few consumer internet categories where users routinely pay for subscriptions. That makes it attractive to investors, but it is also fiercely competitive, with incumbents such as Match Group and Bumble controlling a large share of the market. Rivet will compete with them as well as with newer entrants such as The League and Wingman, which also lean on curated or friend-assisted introductions.

Rivet's differentiation lies in turning matchmaking into a community activity. If it works, the model could create a network effect that is hard for incumbents to replicate: the more matchers join, the better the recommendations become, and the more valuable the platform is to people seeking partners.

The risks are equally clear. Consumer social products need scale to work, and building a two-sided community in a market as large and crowded as the US is expensive. Rivet will need to persuade people to spend time matching others without a direct reward, and it will need robust safeguards to protect privacy and prevent misuse of personal information by third-party matchers.

A notable moment for Indian women founders

The round also stands out for what it represents. Women-led start-ups continue to receive a small share of venture capital in India and globally. A $10.5 million seed round for a consumer company with a woman co-founder, backed by some of India's most prominent early-stage investors, is a meaningful signal.

It also reflects a broader trend of Indian founders building products for global, and particularly American, consumers from day one. Rather than launching in India and expanding later, Rivet is using India-based talent and operations to serve the US market directly. The approach has become more common among software and consumer companies as founders seek larger addressable markets and higher revenue per user.

Kapoor's own career illustrates why Indian operators are increasingly well placed to do this. As the head of Tinder's India business, she worked on one of the platform's largest growth markets and gained first-hand experience of how user behaviour, safety expectations and monetisation differ across cultures.

What comes next

With fresh capital in hand, Rivet's immediate priorities are product development and distribution in the United States. The company will need to show that social matching produces better outcomes than swiping, measured not just in downloads, but in conversations that turn into dates and relationships.

The broader dating industry will be watching. Incumbents have struggled to reignite growth among younger users, many of whom say they prefer meeting people through friends or in person. If Rivet can bottle that experience digitally, it will have found something the category has been searching for.

For Taru Kapoor, the venture is a chance to rewrite the product she helped scale. Her stated aim is to make online dating feel less like a numbers game and more like a community helping its members find each other. With $10.5 million, a seasoned co-founder and backing from Peak XV, Shine Capital and Blume Ventures, she now has the resources to test that idea on one of the world's most competitive consumer stages.