Yesterday, Hinge founder Justin McLeod shared more details about his next venture, an AI matchmaking service called Overtone.
McLeod announced his departure from Hinge back in Dec. 2025 to focus on Overtone, which he plans to launch later this year in select locations. (You can put yourself on the waitlist if you’re interested.)
“Overtone is not a dating app,” McLeod wrote in the latest blog post. “By that I mean it’s not a social platform with profiles that reduce people to stats, quotes and photos. There are no opaque, algorithmic feeds trained on split-second impulses. And there’s no juggling likes, matches and chats across many people at once.”
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Rather, the post goes on, Overtone is a service. McLeod promises Overtone will make only introductions “worth making” and will explain why someone is a match. He wants to bring back matchmaking, a longtime practice. These days, it’s pretty limited to those who can spend thousands of dollars on a personal matchmaker, like in the movie Materialists.
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“But this time with the reach and diversity of modern networks, the collective wisdom of relationship science, and the conviction that when it comes to options, all you need is less™,” he wrote (yes, including the trademark).
Details of what Overtone will look like are scarce, but McLeod also announced the company has raised $18 million from FirstMark Capital, Pace Capital, and Match Group. The latter is the dating app conglomerate that owns Hinge.
Additionally, Match Group and Tinder CEO Spencer Rascoff has joined the board, as have executive leadership adviser and founder of The Signal Institute, Diana Chapman, and famed relationship psychotherapist Esther Perel (who partnered with Hinge last year).
Overtone will come at a time when some daters are skeptical about using AI to find them a match. When Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd announced earlier this year that Bumble is killing the swipe and ushering in an AI matchmaker, the reaction online was largely negative. But there are budding AI matchmakers out there, such as Sitch Matchmaking and Ditto AI.
