Grindr wants to be the everything app for gay men; investors are still deciding whether it can pull it off

When George Arison took over Grindr in 2022, he inherited a company that had been bounced from Chinese ownership to a forced divestiture to a private-equity rescue — a business that was printing money but also had no real product or business strategy. Four years, a SPAC listing, and a controversial return-to-office mandate later, Grindr has become convincing as a growth story. Revenue is on pace to roughly triple, from $195 million in 2022 to a guided $540 million-plus this year, with adjusted EBITDA margins holding above 40%.

That growth has come almost entirely from getting existing customers to pay more versus dramatically growing its user base. In the second quarter of this year, it had 1.4 million paying users, or 9% of its user base, but average revenue per user has risen considerably since 2022, and Arison is very focused on where the next leg of growth comes from. Part of that plan includes turning Grindr into a “gayborhood in your pocket” — a platform that handles not just dating and hookups but healthcare (from ED medication to HIV prevention to, eventually, connecting users with gay doctors) and travel (helping users find community wherever they land). It’s the same “everything app” instinct driving much of consumer tech right now.

But that’s not the only thing Arison is throwing against the wall; later this year, Grindr is rolling out a subscription that it’s betting the market will support, a far pricier “EDGE” tier that has already raised hackles from some on the internet (“literally who’s paying for this,” and “we need 2012 grindr back”).

Arison, who previously founded and ran Shift Technologies, the online used-car marketplace he also took public via a SPAC, in 2020, is also aggressively seeking out press to argue that institutional investors continue discounting Grindr’s stock simply because it’s a gay dating app. In a Zoom call with TechCrunch on Thursday, he cited an investor who once showed him a financial model with a literal “Grindr discount” line item, knocking 25% off a fair-value estimate.

Not everyone thinks the discount is justified. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Raymond James have all raised their price targets on the stock this year, and Morgan Stanley upgraded it to “overweight” in July, citing the EDGE tier and Grindr’s telehealth push — part of a run-up that’s seen the stock climb roughly a third over the past six months. Still, that discount isn’t Arison’s imagination — the stock trades at roughly 11 times 2027 EBITDA, about a 35% discount to peers — even if it’s not clear why.

Arison — amiable, with a hint of his native Georgia still in his voice — was game to talk about all of it in a Q&A that has been edited for clarity and length.

You came in to run Grindr in 2022 when it was pretty adrift. What was the first thing you wanted to prioritize?

Three things, really. First, company building. A lot of people had been hired during the peak-COVID era when expectations for in-office productivity were low, and average output was maybe three to four hours of real work a day. We brought people back to the office two days a week in the summer of 2023 — a decision that got a lot of press and a lot of anger. We went down to about 70 employees as a result. Today only around 25 people who were here before I arrived still work at Grindr, and we run lean: 175 U.S. employees plus a team in Colombia, doing $540 million in guided revenue this year.

Second was driving revenue growth by shipping product people would actually pay for — that’s how pay conversion went from under 6% to over 9%, and ARPU nearly doubled. Third was setting a long-term vision: the “gayborhood in your pocket” idea, and everything else — healthcare, travel — that flows from it.

You’ve said Grindr’s engineering culture is underrated. How small is the team actually running this?

About 94 or 95 people across all technical roles. A large-tech-company CEO once told me AI would let me do with far fewer people what I thought I’d need 300 to 350 for — he was right. We’re doing roughly 350 people’s worth of work with about 100. Something like 80% of our code is now AI-written, and we’ve seen a 2.5x increase in engineering productivity over the past year.

Grindr tested an AI-powered premium tier, EDGE, at a price that in Canada worked out to roughly $350–375 a month in U.S. dollars — a number that got mocked online as more expensive than just dating someone. What actually happened there?

We haven’t released EDGE — we’re testing it, and some people have access as part of that test. It sits above our existing XTRA ($23.99) and Unlimited ($44.99) tiers. We’re not selling AI itself; we’re selling features derived from it — using what we know about a user’s behavior and intent, with consent, to make much better matches than a sparse profile ever could. Retention on these features so far is higher than anything we’ve had before.

The pricing people quoted was one test point among several — we ran a range to understand elasticity, not a final price. EDGE goes live toward the end of this year or early next, and we’ll know where it lands by then. We think of it like a Tesla Model X or S: a premium flagship now, with the underlying capability rolling down to the broader product over time.

On the matching itself — you’ve described using AI to suggest partners outside someone’s home city, because gay-dating pools even in places like San Francisco are small. What evidence do you have that those long-distance matches lead anywhere?

Even in San Francisco, where the share of the gay population is higher than almost anywhere else in the country, you’re talking about maybe 50,000 to 60,000 gay people total. That’s not a big pool to be fishing in if you’re trying to find a partner, and it’s a big reason dating is so hard for gay men generally. So yes — what if AI could break down the geographic constraint entirely, and surface someone in St. Louis who actually matches what you want, based on real behavior rather than what people say in a profile?

As for whether it leads anywhere real: we don’t track people’s relationships after the fact — that’s going too far. What we do know is that Grindr is where most gay men say they meet each other for relationships, and that younger cohorts want something different than older ones did: about 50% of gay men under 35 say they want a long-term monogamous relationship, and 25% say they want children — numbers that would have been unthinkable for my own generation. When you ask people why they’re not in a relationship, the answer is usually that they have a hard time finding a partner. I can’t promise this solves that. But it’s worth trying something new, because what’s been done so far clearly hasn’t solved it.

There are so many ways to expand your addressable market beyond the dating app itself. The healthcare stuff is really interesting — can you tell us more about what you’re doing there, and whether you’re building these products yourselves or acting as the interface to outside providers?

We started with cash-pay products through a line we call Woodwork — ED medications, GLP-1s, peptides, and so on — because cash-pay was the simplest place to get going, and we just launched an AI bot that handles the whole transaction inside the app rather than sending people out to Woodwork.com. The second bucket is HIV prevention and treatment: we’ve committed to giving 10 million people direct access to information on where to get PrEP, both in the U.S., where we already offer that in our in-app health center, and internationally.

The third bucket — actual clinical care, like connecting people to a gay doctor through telehealth — is very much long-term. That’s not something we’re building today, but I do think there’s a world, a decade out, where healthcare is a bigger revenue stream for Grindr than what we do today.

Right now, though, non-subscription revenue — ads and everything else, including healthcare — is a small fraction of the business.

Subscriptions are about 83% of revenue today, down from around 86% in 2022, even though subscription revenue itself has grown enormously — that tells you how much bigger the base is overall. The newer businesses are genuinely small right now. What I want is a company that, 10 years from now, has a strong subscription business, a strong advertising business, a real healthcare business, and a real travel business alongside it. Today those last two are early.

You’ve said investors still apply what one called a “Grindr discount” to the stock because of what the company is. But the stock is up sharply over the past six months, Morgan Stanley just upgraded it, and it trades at a premium multiple to Match Group. Isn’t the market telling you the discount is gone?

I hope we’re being treated as a growth company at this point — we’ve grown revenue more than 25% for 16 straight quarters as CEO, so there’s reason to expect that. The stigma conversation is a real one; we’ve had a consulting firm decline to work with us over reputational concerns, and a bank refuse our money during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, even as other major banks like Goldman and Morgan Stanley have been strong partners. I think a lot of that is really about Grindr being a gay dating product rather than dating being controversial per se — nobody says that about Tinder, which literally has a “free tonight” button on its homepage. But I’d agree the market’s read on us has clearly improved.