Tinder Makes Its First Acquisition With Evanescent Messenger Tappy

Tinder has just signed the closing deal with Chill, creators of Tappy, as part of their acquire and hire strategy. With this Tinder has just closed its first acquisition. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet.

Tappy is a mobile messenger that uses photos and evanescence to put a new face on text messaging. All messages disappear after 24 hours. All conversations on Tappy must begin with a photo.  After that one can evolve that photo into a chat thread. It is similar in many ways on the lines of Snapchat and Instagram.

“We’re growing and recruiting like crazy,” said Sean Rad, co-founder and CEO of Tinder. “It’s incredibly difficult to find talented people to join us fast enough to keep up with our roadmap for 2015, which includes some ambitious plans. When I spoke with Brian, we found that our goals for two separate products were such a great match. There are some specific things that they’ve done in the past that we wouldn’t have to figure out on our own moving forward.”

Tinder is recording 1.5 billion swipes every day, 21 million matches, and has recently crossed the 5 billion match mark. Tinder had recorded 1 billion matches in March 2014, and 1 billion swipes a day with 12 million matches a day as of October 2014.

With the acquisition of Tappy there are chances of a direct photo messaging option to be available on the Tinder application since Tinder has not allowed it so far.

“We’re very good at connecting people, but there’s this ‘what happens after that?’ moment that we want to improve,” said Rad. “We not only want to get better at the way we use criteria to connect people, but we want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place. The Tappy team will help us tackle both fronts, the pre-match experience of creating that first connection and the post-match experience of communicating with that person.”

“I’m a bit of a historian when it comes to the internet, and I know that things that grow like Tinder has, don’t come around very often,” said Brian Norgard, Tappy co-founder. “The chance to work with Sean was too strong of a draw because we knew that if we could couple Tappy DNA with Tinder DNA that we can do awesome stuff. Messaging has gotten very overheated, and this gives us the chance to lead from the front.”