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We were promised jetpacks, but let’s be honest, they’re just plain unsafe. So a nice drone ride is probably all we should reasonably expect. Lift Aircraft is the latest to make a play for the passenger multirotor market, theoretical as it is, and its craft is a sleek little thing with some interesting design choices to make it suitable for laypeople to “pilot.”

The Austin-based company just took the wraps off the Hexa, the 18-rotor craft it intends to make available for short recreational flights. It just flew for the first time last month, and could be taking passengers aloft as early as next year.

The Hexa is considerably more lightweight than the aircraft that seemed to be getting announced every month or two earlier this year. Lift’s focus isn’t on transport, which is a phenomenally complicated problem both in terms or regulation and engineering. Instead, it wants to simply make the experience of flying in a giant drone available for thrill-seekers with a bit of pocket money.

This reduced scope means the craft can get away with being just 432 pounds and capable of 10-15 minutes of sustained flight with a single passenger. Compared with Lilium’s VTOL engines or Volocopter’s 36-foot wingspan, this thing looks like a toy. And that’s essentially what it is, for now. But there’s something to be said for proving your design in a comparatively easily accessed market and moving up, rather than trying to invent an air taxi business from scratch.

“Multi-seat eVTOL air taxis, especially those that are designed to transition to wing-borne flight, are probably 10 years away and will require new regulations and significant advances in battery technology to be practical and safe. We didn’t want to wait for major technology or regulatory breakthroughs to start flying,” said Chasen in a news release. “We’ll be flying years before anyone else.”

The Hexa is flown with a single joystick and an iPad; direct movements and attitude control are done with the former, while destination-based movement, takeoff and landing take place on the latter. This way people can go from walking in the front door to flying one of these things — or rather riding in one and suggesting some directions to go — in an hour or so.

It’s small enough that it doesn’t even count as a “real” aircraft; it’s a “powered ultralight,” which is a plus and a minus: no pilot’s license necessary, but you can’t go past a few hundred feet of altitude or fly over populated areas. No doubt there’s still a good deal of fun you can have flying around a sort of drone theme park, though. The whole area will have been 3D mapped prior to flight, of course.

Lifting the Hexa are 18 rotors, each of which is powered by its own battery, which spreads the risk out considerably and makes it simple to swap them out. As far as safety is concerned, it can run with up to 6 engines down, has pontoons in case of a water landing, and an emergency parachute should the unthinkable happen.

The team is looking to roll out its drone-riding experience soon, but it has yet to select its first city. Finding a good location, checking with the community, getting the proper permits — not simple. CEO Matt Chasen told New Atlas the craft is “not very loud, but they’re also not whisper-quiet, either.” I’m thinking “not very loud” is in comparison to jets — every drone I’ve ever come across, from palm-sized to cargo-bearing, has made an incredible racket and if someone wanted to start a drone preserve next door I’d fight it tooth and nail. (Apparently Seattle is high on the list, too, so this may come to pass.)

In a sense, engineering a working autonomous multirotor aircraft was the easy part of building this business. Chasen told GeekWire that the company has raised a “typical-size seed round,” and is preparing for a Series A — probably once it has a launch city in its sights.

We’ll likely hear more at SXSW in March, where the Hexa will likely fly its first passengers.

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At the heart of the lightweight augmented reality glasses that you’ve been promised is the a display engine that a handful of tech companies are racing to improve.

WaveOptics is one such startup looking to expand the capabilities and shrink the form factor of waveguide displays.

The UK-based company has just raised $26 million in what it’s calling the “first stage” of its Series C. The money is coming from Octopus Ventures as well as IP Group, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Gobi Partners, Goertek and Optimas Capital Partners.

Late last month, Sunnyvale-based DigiLens announced that they has raised new funding from Mitsubishi and Niantic. The increased movement comes just months after it was reported that Apple had acquired a waveguide display manufacturer, Akonia Holographics.

For so many of the companies, the mass market promise of AR is that they can eventually deliver something that every day consumers can use as a replacement for their smartphones.

Here’s a rundown of waveguides from WaveOptics:

The backbone of these AR systems are the increasingly shrinking waveguide displays. The display engines are incredibly complex and they’re both the most expensive component for most of today’s hardware and the piece of tech that is driving the bulky form factors we’re seeing today.

There will be some more iterative executions of the tech on the consumer side before things shrink down too much, but there are also quite a few existing industries where this tech already makes sense, particularly in the automative and enterprise workforce spaces where fashion is a distant second to utility.

While a lot of the players in the AR display race have been pushing up against the same shortcomings of this display type, there was some uncertainty for a bit as so much excitement rallied around Magic Leap and the giant leaps forward that they were talking about with fiberoptic scanning light field photonic chips and all.

Turns out it was mostly smoke and mirrors in terms of what appeared in the first-gen product, though Magic Leap has promised more advances are on the way for subsequent releases. Nevertheless, the looming presence subsiding is probably welcome news to more skirmish investors who want to be sure they’re backing the right horse.

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TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa just finished in Lagos Nigeria, where 15 companies took the stage for the chance of winning the $25,000 equity-free grand prize, a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019, and the coveted title of “Africa’s Favorite Startup.”

The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet, and mobile phone compatible. The judges were impressed with its scalability potential to make many other medical access devices affordable for Africa, which mother and infant mortality is unforgivably high.

The runner-up was Bettr, a virtual banking experience powered by your smartphone and your data. Bettr has the potential to make banking way more accessible for millions of people currently unbanked across Southern Africa, to begin with.

The other startups pitching, chosen from literally hundreds of entries, were:

Apollo Agriculture: Leverages advances in machine learning, remote imaging via satellite, and mobile money to deliver input finance and agronomic advice to smallholder farmers with radical efficiency and scalability.

Sud-pay: Developed an integrated, multi-support, multi-service, and multi-operator digital tax collection platform that connects merchants to financial institutions.

LabTech,: UriSAF by LabTECH is a urine testing hardware and software solution designed to speed up the diagnosis of Uterine Tract Infections (UTIs).

Complete Farmer: A “crowdfarming” platform that enables users to invest in sustainable farms and monitor farming activities without discarding their daily routine using data driven cultivation protocols and IoT enabled precision farming.

FoodHubs: Uses mobile solar powered cold carts and cold rooms to help smallholders farmers store their produce, so as to avoid post harvest losses.

Honey Flow Africa: Optimizes beekeeping operations by digitizing and bringing the power of IoT to the bee keeping process to improve honey production, processing and predictability.

AgriPredict: Provide farmers with tools that equip them with information that will improve predicting disease, pest infestations, and extreme weather conditions

MAX: Transforms moto-taxi mobility in Africa using mobile apps, inclusive data-driven asset-finance, and a comprehensive driver on-boarding program that uses machine learning and psychometric tests to profile drivers and create credit scores for them. MAX enables financial inclusion for drivers, prioritizes safety, and uses IoT technology to track all drivers in real-time.

CodeLn: An end-to-end technical recruitment platform that automates the entire recruitment process, making it fast and easy for companies to find and test Software Developers and reduce the risk of bad hires.

Bankly: An innovative financial product focused on reaching the unbanked in Africa, in a “Recharge to Save” model. Bankly developed a cash-digitization payment and savings products, in which users pay using Bankly vouchers.

Powerstove Energy: The world’s first clean cookstove with built-in self-powered IoT System for real time monitoring. Its 100 percent smokeless biomass cookstove cooks food times faster and burns 70 times less of processed proprietary water-resistant Goodlife Biomass Pellets produced from forest and agricultural waste.

Pineapple: A fully decentralized insurer. With Pineapple, members pay premiums into their own wallets rather than a central pot. When claims occur, they are distributed to all wallets in the community, which collectively help pay for the claim.

Trend Solar: Assimilated a 4G Android Smartphone and Solar Home System to provide affordable access to energy, internet, and mobile in an all-in-one solution that seeks to address the needs of 640 million+ people currently living off-grid in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, we held our first ever Startup Battlefield in Nairobi, Kenya. African startups impressed us with their innovative solutions and effective business models, so we had to come back and find even more impressive companies from across the continent. TechCrunch reviews several hundred startups from across the region, selecting the top 15 companies to compete on stage. Our partner for the event was Facebook Start.

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Chatbots and other AI-based tools have firmly found footing in the world of customer service, used either to augment or completely replace the role of a human responding to questions and complaints, or (sometimes, annoyingly, at the same time as the previous two functions) sell more products to users.

Today, an Israeli startup called TechSee is announcing $16 million in funding to help build out its own twist on that innovation: an AI-based video service, which uses computer vision, augmented reality and a customer’s own smartphone camera to provide tech support to customers, either alongside assistance from live agents, or as part of a standalone customer service “bot.”

Led by Scale Venture Partners — the storied investor that has been behind some of the bigger enterprise plays of the last several years (including Box, Chef, Cloudhealth, DataStax, Demandbase, DocuSign, ExactTarget, HubSpot, JFrog and fellow Israeli AI assistance startup WalkMe), the Series B also includes participation from Planven Investments, OurCrowd, Comdata Group and Salesforce Ventures. (Salesforce was actually announced as a backer in October.)

The funding will be used both to expand the company’s current business as well as move into new product areas like sales.

Eitan Cohen, the CEO and co-founder, said that the company today provides tools to some 15,000 customer service agents and counts companies like Samsung and Vodafone among its customers across verticals like financial services, tech, telecoms and insurance.

The potential opportunity is big: Cohen estimates there are about 2 million customer service agents in the U.S., and about 14 million globally.

TechSee is not disclosing its valuation. It has raised around $23 million to date.

While TechSee provides support for software and apps, its sweet spot up to now has been providing video-based assistance to customers calling with questions about the long tail of hardware out in the world, used for example in a broadband home Wi-Fi service.

In fact, Cohen said he came up with the idea for the service when his parents phoned him up to help them get their cable service back up, and he found himself challenged to do it without being able to see the set-top box to talk them through what to do.

So he thought about all the how-to videos that are on platforms like YouTube and decided there was an opportunity to harness that in a more organised way for the companies providing an increasing array of kit that may never get the vlogger treatment.

“We are trying to bring that YouTube experience for all hardware,” he said in an interview.

The thinking is that this will become a bigger opportunity over time as more services get digitised, the cost of components continues to come down and everything becomes “hardware.”

“Tech may become more of a commodity, but customer service does not,” he added. “Solutions like ours allow companies to provide low-cost technology without having to hire more people to solve issues [that might arise with it.]”

The product today is sold along two main trajectories: assisting customer reps; and providing unmanned video assistance to replace some of the easier and more common questions that get asked.

In cases where live video support is provided, the customer opts in for the service, similar to how she or he might for a support service that “takes over” the device in question to diagnose and try to fix an issue. Here, the camera for the service becomes a customer’s own phone.

Over time, that live assistance is used in two ways that are directly linked to TechSee’s artificial intelligence play. First, it helps to build up TechSee’s larger back catalogue of videos, where all identifying characteristics are removed with the focus solely on the device or problem in question. Second, the experience in the video is also used to build TechSee’s algorithms for future interactions. Cohen said there are now “millions” of media files — images and videos — in the company’s catalogue.

The effectiveness of its system so far has been pretty impressive. TechSee’s customers — the companies running the customer support — say they have on average seen a 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction (NPS scores), a 17 percent decrease in technician dispatches and between 20 and 30 percent increase in first-call resolutions, depending on the industry.

TechSee is not the only company that has built a video-based customer engagement platform: others include Stryng, CallVU and Vee24. And you could imagine companies like Amazon — which is already dabbling in providing advice to customers based on what its Echo Look can see — might be interested in providing such services to users across the millions of products that it sells, as well as provide that as a service to third parties.

According to Cohen, what TechSee has going for it compared to those startups, and also the potential entry of companies like Microsoft or Amazon into the mix, is a head start on raw data and a vision of how it will be used by the startup’s AI to build the business.

“We believe that anyone who wants to build this would have a challenge making it from scratch,” he said. “This is where we have strong content, millions of images, down to specific model numbers, where we can provide assistance and instructions on the spot.”

Salesforce’s interest in the company, he said, is a natural progression of where that data and customer relationship can take a business beyond responsive support into areas like quick warranty verification (for all those times people have neglected to do a product registration), snapping fender benders for insurance claims and of course upselling to other products and services.

“Salesforce sees the synergies between the sales cloud and the service cloud,” Cohen said.

“TechSee recognized the great potential for combining computer vision AI with augmented reality in customer engagement,” said Andy Vitus, partner at Scale Venture Partners, who joins the board with this round. “Electronic devices become more complex with every generation, making their adoption a perennial challenge. TechSee is solving a massive problem for brands with a technology solution that simplifies the customer experience via visual and interactive guidance.”

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Pitching app developers with a new way to convert app browsers into actual customers, AppOnboard has raised $15 million in a new round of funding, the company said.

Based in Los Angeles, AppOnboard sees itself as one of a new breed of LA startup that’s steeping itself in the local ecosystem and trying to be one of the cornerstone’s for a new technology hub in the southern California region.

Company co-founder Jonathan Zweig has already had one hit as a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur. Zweig was one of the architects behind the success of AdColony, a startup that sold to Opera Software in 2014 for $350 million. It was an early success for the regional ecosystem and proved to be one of the most valuable exits (from a capital efficiency standpoint) for the year.

Now Zweig is back again… this time pitching app developers a tool that can help convert browsers into buyers for new applications in app stores around the world. As consumers sour on the free-to-use model (since that model depends on selling user information in order for “free” apps to make money), giving users a way to try before they buy makes sense.

Zweig claims that conversion rates have increased significantly for the companies that pay a fee for his company’s service. Play Store shoppers who engage with an app store demo before installing have higher retention and are more likely to become paying customers than those who install directly without playing or using a demo version, the company said.

Zweig says that the service is the first from a third party to be directly integrated into a platform like Google’s Play store.

“Google has been a great partner for us,” Zweig says. And the company is in talks with other platforms, he said.

Now, with the additional cash in hand, Zweig says AppOnboard is ready to make some international expansion moves. The company already has offices in London and in cities across the U.S., but Zweig thinks there’s more room to grow.

“Our vision continues to be that every app and game will be instant and available for users to experience without a download. We look forward to continuing to work with global developers, Google, and partners to make this a reality for all mobile app users,” said Bryan Buskas, the chief operating officer of AppOnboard. As part of its new pitch, the company is offering a 30-day free trial for any App Store Demo.

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How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features — like conversation starters, commenting and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named app Coffee Meets Bagel is today announcing a significant makeover, which includes a change to the way the app works.

Its cleaner, lightweight and more modern design does away with bright, competing colors and other outdated features, the company says. But more notably, it has ditched the big “Pass” or “Connect” buttons — its earlier variation on Tinder’s “like” and “dislike” buttons, which nearly all dating apps have now adopted.

Instead, Coffee Meets Bagel’s new interface puts more emphasis on user profiles — showcasing more of the text, and giving users the option to “heart” the profile or now, even comment.

Before a match takes place, users can tap a new commenting button that allows them to respond to the user’s profile directly, before making a connection. This could help potential matches break the ice or even spark a connection that may not have otherwise happened.

The feature is similar, to some extent, to the commenting feature in Hinge, a relationship-focused app that allows users to directly comment on some aspect of another user’s profile.

Coffee Meets Bagel says that during its beta testing, members who sent comments to their matches had a 25 percent higher chance of getting liked back. And when comments led to conversations, there was a 60 percent increase in total messages exchanged.

Focusing on enabling better conversations is a good way for other dating apps to combat Tinder, which leaves communication up to the users to initiate, without much guidance. This leads to inboxes filled with “hi’s” and nothing much else to say. By integrating commenting into profiles, however, users will be prompted to start conversations based on something they’ve read — allowing people to connect based on more than just their photos.

The app has also revamped its Discover and Suggested sections to offer seamless scrolling and better navigation, respectively. These sections are less cluttered than before, too, in keeping with the more minimalist spirit. Even the Coffee Meets Bagel logo has gotten a makeover, where the C and B now meet in the shape of a heart.The company’s anti-Tinder stance is shaping up in its social content, too. While Tinder has more recently embraced hook-up culture and the single life with its online publication “Swipe Life,” CMB is instead creating content that’s more inspiring, it says.

“We’re taking a stance against online dating conventions, like ghosting and treating people like profiles. We’re expanding the conversation to the self: self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-love,” the company explains in its announcement.

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised just under $20 million since launching back in 2012, but it’s faced threats from Tinder, which has challenged its model head-on with Tinder Picks — a curated selection of matches for Tinder Gold subscribers, similar to Coffee Meets Bagel’s curated daily picks.

The company’s app has close to 7 million installs to date, according to data from Sensor Tower, and more than $25 million in gross revenue. The revenue is growing over time, the firm also found, with users spending approximately $900,000 in the app last month, up 30 percent from November 2017.

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How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features – like conversation starters, commenting, and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named app Coffee Meets Bagel is today announcing a significant makeover, which includes a change to the way the app works.

Its cleaner, lightweight and more modern design does away with bright, competing colors and other outdated features, the company says. But more notably, it has ditched the big “Pass” or “Connect” buttons – its earlier variation on Tinder’s “like” and “dislike” buttons, which nearly all dating apps have now adopted.

Instead, Coffee Meets Bagel’s new interface puts more emphasis on user profiles – showcasing more of the text, and giving users the option to “heart” the profile or now, even comment.

Before a match takes place, users can tap a new commenting button that allows them to respond to the user’s profile directly, before making a connection. This could help potential matches break the ice or even spark a connection that may not have otherwise happened.

The feature is similar, to some extent, to the commenting feature in Hinge, a relationship-focused app that allows users to directly comment on some aspect of another user’s profile.

Coffee Meets Bagel says that during its beta testing, members who sent comments to their matches had a 25 percent higher chance of getting liked back. And when comments led to conversations, there was a 60 percent increase in total messages exchanged.

Focusing on enabling better conversations is a good way for other dating apps to combat Tinder, which leaves communication up to the users to initiate, without much guidance. This leads to inboxes filled with “hi’s” and nothing much else to say. By integrating commenting into profiles, however, users will be prompted to start conversations based on something they’ve read – allowing people to connect based on more than just their photos.

The app has also revamped its Discover and Suggested sections to offer seamless scrolling and better navigation, respectively. These sections are less cluttered than before, too, in keeping with the more minimalist spirit. Even the Coffee Meets Bagel logo has gotten a makeover, where the C and B now meet in the shape of heart.

The company’s anti-Tinder stance is shaping up in its social content, too. While Tinder has more recently embraced hook-up culture and the single life with its online publication “Swipe Life,” CMB is instead creating content that’s more inspiring, it says.

“We’re taking a stance against online dating conventions, like ghosting and treating people like profiles. We’re expanding the conversation to the self: self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-love,” the company explains in its announcement.

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised just under $20 million since launching back in 2012, but it’s faced threats from Tinder, which has challenged its model head-on with Tinder Picks – a curated selection of matches for Tinder Gold subscribers, similar to Coffee Meets Bagel’s curated daily picks.

The company’s app has close to 7 million installs to date, according to data from Sensor Tower, and more than $25 million in gross revenue. The revenue is growing over time, the firm also found, with users spending approximately $900,000 in the app last month, up 30% from November 2017.

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How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features – like conversation starters, commenting, and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named app Coffee Meets Bagel is today announcing a significant makeover, which includes a change to the way the app works.

Its cleaner, lightweight and more modern design does away with bright, competing colors and other outdated features, the company says. But more notably, it has ditched the big “Pass” or “Connect” buttons – its earlier variation on Tinder’s “like” and “dislike” buttons, which nearly all dating apps have now adopted.

Instead, Coffee Meets Bagel’s new interface puts more emphasis on user profiles – showcasing more of the text, and giving users the option to “heart” the profile or now, even comment.

Before a match takes place, users can tap a new commenting button that allows them to respond to the user’s profile directly, before making a connection. This could help potential matches break the ice or even spark a connection that may not have otherwise happened.

The feature is similar, to some extent, to the commenting feature in Hinge, a relationship-focused app that allows users to directly comment on some aspect of another user’s profile.

Coffee Meets Bagel says that during its beta testing, members who sent comments to their matches had a 25 percent higher chance of getting liked back. And when comments led to conversations, there was a 60 percent increase in total messages exchanged.

Focusing on enabling better conversations is a good way for other dating apps to combat Tinder, which leaves communication up to the users to initiate, without much guidance. This leads to inboxes filled with “hi’s” and nothing much else to say. By integrating commenting into profiles, however, users will be prompted to start conversations based on something they’ve read – allowing people to connect based on more than just their photos.

The app has also revamped its Discover and Suggested sections to offer seamless scrolling and better navigation, respectively. These sections are less cluttered than before, too, in keeping with the more minimalist spirit. Even the Coffee Meets Bagel logo has gotten a makeover, where the C and B now meet in the shape of heart.

The company’s anti-Tinder stance is shaping up in its social content, too. While Tinder has more recently embraced hook-up culture and the single life with its online publication “Swipe Life,” CMB is instead creating content that’s more inspiring, it says.

“We’re taking a stance against online dating conventions, like ghosting and treating people like profiles. We’re expanding the conversation to the self: self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-love,” the company explains in its announcement.

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised just under $20 million since launching back in 2012, but it’s faced threats from Tinder, which has challenged its model head-on with Tinder Picks – a curated selection of matches for Tinder Gold subscribers, similar to Coffee Meets Bagel’s curated daily picks.

The company’s app has close to 7 million installs to date, according to data from Sensor Tower, and more than $25 million in gross revenue. The revenue is growing over time, the firm also found, with users spending approximately $900,000 in the app last month, up 30% from November 2017.

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How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features – like conversation starters, commenting, and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named app Coffee Meets Bagel is today announcing a significant makeover, which includes a change to the way the app works.

Its cleaner, lightweight and more modern design does away with bright, competing colors and other outdated features, the company says. But more notably, it has ditched the big “Pass” or “Connect” buttons – its earlier variation on Tinder’s “like” and “dislike” buttons, which nearly all dating apps have now adopted.

Instead, Coffee Meets Bagel’s new interface puts more emphasis on user profiles – showcasing more of the text, and giving users the option to “heart” the profile or now, even comment.

Before a match takes place, users can tap a new commenting button that allows them to respond to the user’s profile directly, before making a connection. This could help potential matches break the ice or even spark a connection that may not have otherwise happened.

The feature is similar, to some extent, to the commenting feature in Hinge, a relationship-focused app that allows users to directly comment on some aspect of another user’s profile.

Coffee Meets Bagel says that during its beta testing, members who sent comments to their matches had a 25 percent higher chance of getting liked back. And when comments led to conversations, there was a 60 percent increase in total messages exchanged.

Focusing on enabling better conversations is a good way for other dating apps to combat Tinder, which leaves communication up to the users to initiate, without much guidance. This leads to inboxes filled with “hi’s” and nothing much else to say. By integrating commenting into profiles, however, users will be prompted to start conversations based on something they’ve read – allowing people to connect based on more than just their photos.

The app has also revamped its Discover and Suggested sections to offer seamless scrolling and better navigation, respectively. These sections are less cluttered than before, too, in keeping with the more minimalist spirit. Even the Coffee Meets Bagel logo has gotten a makeover, where the C and B now meet in the shape of heart.

The company’s anti-Tinder stance is shaping up in its social content, too. While Tinder has more recently embraced hook-up culture and the single life with its online publication “Swipe Life,” CMB is instead creating content that’s more inspiring, it says.

“We’re taking a stance against online dating conventions, like ghosting and treating people like profiles. We’re expanding the conversation to the self: self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-love,” the company explains in its announcement.

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised just under $20 million since launching back in 2012, but it’s faced threats from Tinder, which has challenged its model head-on with Tinder Picks – a curated selection of matches for Tinder Gold subscribers, similar to Coffee Meets Bagel’s curated daily picks.

The company’s app has close to 7 million installs to date, according to data from Sensor Tower, and more than $25 million in gross revenue. The revenue is growing over time, the firm also found, with users spending approximately $900,000 in the app last month, up 30% from November 2017.

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