I think it’s important for the business to be able to hear from real users of the site, so that is a priority for us. And we absolutely have the intention of recruiting more gay members of the community to every level of Grindr, from the lower levels to senior team to the board. Marini: There are 15 members of the senior team that are part of the gay community, and we will continue to work with them as part of our team. The Times: To be clear, no one on the new ownership team - including the two of you - identifies as LGBTQ, is that right? They spoke with the The Times in June, right before taking control of Grindr. Marini has three start-ups under his belt and extensive experience as an investor. Bonforte has founded and run five start-ups, and spent five years as an executive at Yahoo running the internet company’s mail and social products. Scott Chen, its chief executive under Kunlun, sparked a controversy in 2018 when he said he supported same-sex marriage, but personally believed that marriage is “a holy union between a man and a woman.” For many users, that underlined some of the contradictions of having straight men run a gay dating app.īonforte and Marini are managing partners at Catapult Capital, a San Francisco private equity firm, and have long careers in technology behind them. Grindr’s ownership had come under fire as well. Users had also criticized the company’s racial search filter for years, saying it fostered a culture of racism within the Grindr dating scene (the company announced on June 1 that it was removing the filter in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests). Grindr has been criticized for its data privacy practices in the past, and as recently as January was banned from Twitter for its handling of user privacy.
regulators, highlights concern over the threat of Beijing using sensitive data against Americans.īonforte and Marini find themselves in the enviable position of taking over a company with solid profits, an active and dedicated user base in the tens of millions, and a leading position in the gay dating market. The sale of the gay dating app Grindr, forced by U.S. Grindr is being sold by Chinese owner after U.S. Two of the investors in San Vicente, Jeff Bonforte and Rick Marini, announced in a company meeting that they would be Grindr’s chief executive and chief operating officer, respectively. Then in mid-June, Grindr’s employees got to meet some of their new bosses for the first time. A low-profile investment group, San Vicente Acquisitions, bought the company for $608 million. citizens, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States announced that it was forcing Kunlun to sell the company to American owners in March 2019.Ī year later, Kunlun reached a deal. Citing fears that the Chinese government could use personal data stored on the app to blackmail U.S. bought Grindr in 2016 and had hopes of taking the company public in a large stock offering until the U.S. The international ownership saga of America’s most popular gay dating app, Grindr, came to a close last month when a group of American investors took control of the West Hollywood company.Ĭhina-based Beijing Kunlun Tech Co.