Meet Ditto: the AI startup trying to reinvent college dating

Hinge’s founder recently left the app to start an AI matchmaking service, but he isn’t the only one with that startup idea. Ditto is an AI matchmaker specifically for college students — and it does all the work in iMessage.  

“For the past 20 years, we’ve connected in primitive ways. We manually scroll. We manually search. We manually swipe,” Ditto AI’s manifesto reads on its website. “Spending hours trying to find the right people — because all we have are static and dead profiles.”

“But now, everything changes,” Ditto promises.

Ditto was founded by Eric Liu and Allen Wang, two University of California, Berkeley students who dropped out around four years ago to create a new consumer product, Liu said in an interview with Mashable.

“We are both pretty outgoing people, and we see a lot of gaps in the current dating apps,” he said. These gaps are apparent in the manifesto: “No more wasted hours. No more missed connections. No more ‘what ifs.'”

Liu reiterated that dating apps are primitive, and he’s sure there’ll be a new platform in the next five years, and that the whole social landscape will be very different a decade from now. “All the existing platforms are by no means efficient at all,” he told Mashable. In ten years, however, people will be able to make a new connection in hours, not weeks. If you’re free for dinner tonight, an agent can set it up, he said.

Traditional dating apps have too many layers and too much churn, making an eventual date unlikely, he explained. “Users don’t need to you know swipe left and right to find a mutual match, and they don’t need to repetitively introduce themselves, make small talk, and arrange dates.”

Ditto offers something different, and the founders aren’t shy about it. “I dropped out of Berkeley with Eric Liu to kill Tinder with AI,” Wang posted on LinkedIn last year. But Ditto still has marketing tricks in the mix, too, like flyers on college campuses and yacht parties.

How Ditto AI works

According to Ditto’s website, users submit “preferences” by midnight on Wednesday morning, and then later that evening, Ditto will send a match. From there, you schedule a date. (Users must be verified college students.)

When asked about how Ditto learns a user’s preferences, Liu said the answer is complicated. “I believe we reinvented a lot more than just the technology,” he said. “We actually also have to spend a lot of time on the user experience, because it’s drastically different.” Ditto works within one’s iMessage, not a separate app. 

Credit: Ditto

Credit: Ditto

The site’s FAQ states that Ditto pairs one student with another by analyzing their profiles and comparing preferences. Apparently, “this process employs rigorous computation and simulation to provide the best insights for curating a successful date.”

Ditto leverages the reasoning abilities of LLMs and an agentic system that includes insights from experts in analysis, matchmaking, scheduling, and more, according to the site. 

Liu said that pre-filled profiles from users (like those used by traditional dating apps) have nothing to do with predicting chemistry. Instead, more important data is people’s feedback from the dates, which is why they want to speed up the process. The more dates, the more data. 

Credit: Ditto

If a user signs up on Tuesday, they can get a date the next day. “That’s pretty much unimaginable on traditional apps,” he said. Though if you’ve been on Tinder or Feeld, you’ve likely met someone who’s down to meet that night — and that is even more true on an app like Grindr.

There are people on Ditto who have gone on 20 dates, and the AI is trained based on that data. It’s also trained on user conversations with the matchmaker, user interactions with each other, and feedback for how the date went.

On Ditto’s website, it looks like there’s a facial scan component as well. “I’d say definitely facial features, physical appearances are part of our algorithm,” Liu said. (There’s also a “bodycount detector” on the website, which Liu said one of the interns made, and that it’s not part of Ditto’s product. It requires a “facial scan,” and much like the viral Check Her Body Count site, has an unsavory taste to it.)

Do AI matchmakers work?

The site also claims it has a 65 percent success rate, which is based on how many matches go on dates. “The match-to-date ratio on our platform is much higher than on other platforms,” he said. 

In testimonials he sent to Mashable, users praised the quality of matches and the ease of getting them.

“Talking or chatting with Ditto through messages [has] also been easy. It’s been good so far,” said Adriana, a University of Southern California student. 

“It’s a different thing. It’s also easier. There’s less friction for me,” said Noah, a student at Berkeley. He initially thought it was confusing when cofounder Allen [Wang] explained it to me, “But it’s easier than that app, because then it’s like, okay, download this app to make an account, to do all this. I don’t really want to do all of that.”

And the company is doing something right, as it raised over $9 million earlier this year, according to Business Insider.

On Reddit, however, Ditto’s reviews aren’t so positive. Complaints include the company “spamming” campuses with fliers, that it’s a “scam,” and that it permits advertisers to track user data.

But it seems like, much like LLMs themselves, that AI matchmakers aren’t going away. In addition to Ditto, there’s Sitch AI (Mashable interviewed its founder last year), Amata, and Keeper. (And, of course, Overtone from Hinge founder Justin McLeod — which is launching later this year.) 

Major dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have also integrated AI features into the app, such as Tinder’s AI matchmaker Chemistry and Hinge’s AI Convo Starters feature. Bumble is eliminating its swipe feature and ushering in a more AI-forward experience by the end of 2026.

And just as Tinder and Bumble are leaning into in-person events despite utilizing the latest technology, though, so is Ditto, in the form of yacht parties. 

Credit: Ditto

“The team is just like super excited to be able to create these in real-life events and see people making new friends or like finding finding more loves during during these events,” he said. As of this writing, Ditto is hiring a “Chief Yacht Officer.” Duties include planning 10 yacht parties across the U.S. and designing the event flow “to facilitate fun and meaningful blind-date connections between Ditto users.”

They’re also great marketing campaigns. In addition to yacht parties, Ditto also has run clubs, reading clubs, and walking clubs in San Francisco. 

Given technological advancement and changes in social culture, Liu believes Ditto is the next thing. According to him, it’s about time the next generation of social media — a lower-effort, higher-efficiency social network — is born. 

“We are almost there,” he said.