It’s a universally accepted truth that the current dating scene sucks, no matter what city you live in. Everyone has a story. And everyone has a complaint.
Take Miles Slayton, who completed a banking internship in New York City and saw how he and his friends struggled to find significant others in the city’s brutal dating landscape. “We are on our phones more than ever,” he told TechCrunch. “I thought to myself, ‘Why are dating apps terrible?'”
He thought the problem wasn’t with dating apps, but with the way products work these days. Many popular dating apps were created with Millennials in mind, he said, but their generation, Gen Z, operates in a completely different way. It’s a throwback to how dating used to be: People of this generation meet “through mutual connections, through people in our social circle,” he said.
He launched Circa a few months ago with friends Willie Conzelman and Carter Munk. dating app that matches people With other people who are already in their social circle. The company announced a $1.6 million seed round this summer and people are already talking about it: The app has about 60,000 users, primarily in New York and spread across universities.
The company is part of Startup Battlefield and will be showing its technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in San Francisco later this month.
Company CEO Slayton said there’s a reason Gen Z has retreated toward old ways of dating, and that’s the internet and the COVID pandemic. “We don’t trust strangers,” he said, adding that people are also very afraid of rejection.
Cerca’s product tries to solve this. Users create a standard dating profile, sync their contacts, and from there, only friends already on the app or friends of friends are shown as potential matches. “The fear of strangers is gone,” Slayton said. All likes are anonymous, reducing the fear of rejection. Users get four swipes a day, he said, in hopes of getting rid of swiping fatigue and putting more emphasis on selecting matches.
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“There’s no world where you have to look at 100 profiles a minute,” he said. “You should really take a second to think about each profile. These are real people.”
The profile first shows similar friends, then the background, and then the photo. “For us, it’s not just about looks,” he said. Users receive a notification that someone has liked their profile, although they may not know who. The Cerca algorithm will promote the profile of the person who has liked to the feed of the person they are interested in, who can then decide whether to like them back or not.
Every evening, matches unfold and no one knows who made the first move.
Having the same friends makes it easier to check safety, as people can easily message their mutual friends to get information about who they are going on a date with. Users can also choose which and how many contacts they want to share with Circa, as well as block certain people from seeing their profile. “You can also filter out words like dentist, doctor,” he said. “No screenshotting or screen recording. Security is paramount to us.”
Apart from the online world, the company has also created merchandise and is hosting events.
Slayton said he and his co-founders decided to apply to Startup Battlefield and that they knew a founder who had participated in the program. “I think this is an opportunity for America and the world to see who we are and present dating in a positive light,” he said.
If you want to learn first-hand from Circa, and see dozens of additional pitches, participate in valuable workshops, and build relationships that drive business results, To learn more about this year’s disruption, go hereHeld in San Francisco from 27 to 29 October.
