For men, the new AI app Keeper costs a lot, but as with all other such services, it is free for women. In an environment where women want dinner and men want sex, Keeper will get you a “soulmate”
The company has just raised another $4 billion due to their “amazing matchmaking technology” even though they are only in the early stages.
Keeper, an AI matchmaking startup, thinks it can help deliver your “soulmate” to you.
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Men pay, women are allowed in for free
“We say we actually know who might or might not be your soulmate,” Jake Kozloski, Keeper’s CEO, told Business Insider. “We’re not going to waste your time pretending that hundreds of thousands of these people could be. We will say no.”
In other words, Keeper will tell you (but not send you what you’ve paid back) if there isn’t a “soulmate” for you.
Founded in 2022, the dating platform uses layers of algorithms and AI models to match people who sign up for the service. The startup is now revealing for the first time, exclusively to Business Insider, that it raised a $4 million upfront investment in October 2024, led by Lightbank and Lakehouse Ventures. Goodwater Capital and Champion Hill Ventures participated in the round, among others.
Investors “see AI as a turning point in the dating app landscape” and an opportunity to “disrupt the established players,” Kozloski said.
Keeper isn’t the only startup trying its hand at the online dating market with an AI. Other AI matchmaking apps, such as Sitch and Amata, have raised millions to build next-generation dating apps. Established dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are also making moves with AI-powered experiences.
The starting price for men is 5000 dollars! (And people pay, not so strange when we know that some have traveled all the way to MO in Rana to)
Kozloski said the company’s values were another element of the pitch that attracted some investors.
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“They feel like it’s a marital crisis in connection with all of Elon Musk’s fertility crisis thing he’s talking about,” said Kozloski, who described Keeper as “friendly to the pronatalist movement.”
However, wanting children is not a requirement to use Goalkeeper, Kozloski added.
Since its launch, Keeper has had over 1.5 million registrations, and about 300,000 of these have created accounts, Kozloski said. Among this group, there has been a “small number” of hits. Keeper didn’t share exactly how many matches it has made, but according to the pitch deck, 10% of dates from the beta resulted in marriage. With the funding, Keeper has been building out its matchmaking technology over the past year.
Keeper is currently limited to heterosexual couples and does not offer explicit options for different gender identities.
“We essentially need to build a new algorithm for gay relationships, which we would like to do and will eventually do, but for now, we will first achieve the product-market pass with our core product,” Kozloski said. “To be honest, heterosexual relationships, especially for finding life partners, seem to be a bigger market, a stronger market for us right now.”
Creating a profile on Keeper is a thorough process. The first account creation form asks for the standard details of many dating apps (such as your age or height), as well as academic test scores (including SAT), your career aspirations, salary, and net worth. It even encourages taking an external personality test. After you’ve completed the first introductory survey, there are 13 more steps, from uploading photos to sharing your philosophy on love.
“We don’t let our users create their own profiles,” Kozloski said. Keeper uses the information it collects to design a profile for you.
Kozloski said that Keeper first uses a non-AI algorithm to streamline potential matches, focusing on data points such as age range at the start.
“We use large language models when we have your top hundred that our other algorithms have identified,” he said. “The big language models are trained on our matchmaking insights that we’ve learned so far, so they can narrow down the last hundred and make the final choice: ‘OK, who’s actually worth offering among these.'”
Some of the AI matchmaking comes into play when analyzing “overall attractiveness” and users’ specific attributes, such as baldness or hair color, Kozloski said. The startup has also partnered with a research team at Stanford, Kozloski said, which helps train the large language models (Keeper provides anonymized data to the research team).
However, Keeper is not fully automated, and currently includes human matchmakers in the process. If there is a match, Keeper connects the two people via text message.
The startup has a complicated payment structure with a significant price tag – but only for men.
Keeper has male users who sign a “marriage premium” that usually costs $50,000 (if the user gets married) and makes them pay $5,000 for all dates from the service (the date fees go towards the total prize cost, Kozloski said).
An appropriate comment on the pricing is from social media: “Do you get the “marriage premium” back the day your wife goes ahead and takes half of everything you own?”
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