It is a truth universally acknowledged that the current dating scene sucks, irrespective of what city you reside in. Everyone has their very own story. And everyone blames each other.
Take Myles Slayton, who interned in banking in New York and watched as he and his friends struggled to search out significant others in the city’s cutthroat dating scene. “We’re using our phones more than ever,” he told TechCrunch. “I thought to myself, ‘Why are dating apps terrible?'”
He concluded that it is probably not a problem with dating apps themselves, but quite with the way these products currently work. Many popular dating apps were created with millennials in mind, but his generation, Gen Z, operates in a very different way, he said. It’s a return to what dating was like: people of this generation meet “through relationships with each other, through people in our social circles,” he said.
He teamed up with friends Willy Conzelman and Carter Munk and launched Cerca just a few months ago, a dating app that matches people with other individuals who are already in their social circles. The company announced a $1.6 million seed round this summer and has already made waves: The app has about 60,000 users, mostly in New York and universities.
The company is a part of Startup Battlefield and will showcase its technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 later this month in San Francisco.
Slayton, the company’s CEO, said there is a reason why Gen Z has retreated to the old ways of dating: the web and the Covid-19 pandemic. “We just don’t trust strangers,” he said, adding that folks also have a deep fear of rejection.
Cerca’s product tries to resolve this problem. Users create a standard dating profile, sync their contacts, and from there, only friends or friends of friends already using the app appear as potential matches. “The fear of aliens has been eliminated,” Slayton said. All likes are anonymous, which alleviates the fear of rejection. Users get 4 swipes a day, he said, in hopes of eliminating swipe fatigue and putting more emphasis on fit selection.
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“There is no world where you should be seeing 100 profiles per minute,” he said. “You should really take a moment to think about each profile. These are real people.”
Profiles first reveal mutual friends, then background, and finally photos. “For us, it’s not just about looks,” he said. The user will receive a notification that somebody has liked his profile, although he will not know who. Cerca’s algorithm will enhance the profile of somebody who has posted a like on the feed of somebody they are interested in, and they will then determine whether to love that person.
Matches are revealed every night and no one knows who made the first move.
Having mutual friends makes it easier to confirm security because people can simply text their mutual friends to get information about who they are going on a date with. Users can even select which and how many contacts they need to share with Cerca, in addition to block certain people from accessing their profiles. “You can also filter out words like dentist, doctor,” he said. “There are no screenshots or screen recordings. Security is our top priority.”
In addition to the online world, the company also creates gadgets and organizes events.
Slayton said he and his co-founders decided to use to Startup Battlefield and knew the founder who attended the event. “I think this is a great opportunity for the United States and the world to see who we are and present dating in a positive light,” he said.
