10.8 million monthly users
Dating app Grindr wants to go public
05/10/2022 06:44 am
Things aren’t going well for Grindr in China. And there are problems in Sweden too. Nevertheless, the US company wants to take the step onto the stock exchange floor. The dating app for the LGBTQ+ community is said to be worth $2.1 billion.
Queer dating site Grindr plans to go public. The US company announced that it has teamed up with a special acquisition company for this purpose. The company is valued at $2.1 billion and is expected to raise $384 million from the IPO. With the money, Grindr wants to “further expand the opportunities it offers the LGBTQ+ community,” said CEO Jeff Bonforte.
The startup, which was founded in 2009, claims to be profitable. It bills itself as “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans and queer people”. According to Grindr, it had an average of 10.8 million monthly users last year, most of whom are 35 years old or younger.
The merger of Grindr with a so-called Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) is therefore still subject to official approval and is expected to be completed in the second half of this year. SPACs are formed to collect money from investors and use it to take a previously unknown company public.
Grindr was previously owned by Chinese group Beijing Kunlun Tech. The latter sold the app to investors in 2020 under pressure from US authorities who feared that the potential misuse of the data could pose a risk to national security. The Grindr app disappeared from several app stores in China earlier this year as part of an alleged data protection campaign by the Chinese Internet Authority.
Last December, Norwegian authorities fined the company more than six million euros for data protection violations. Grindr appealed against this.