Paired, a leading app to improve romantic relationships, today announced it has raised around €2.9 million in seed funding, bringing the total raised by the company to date around €3.7 million.
The round was led by Eka Ventures with participation from existing investors including Taavet Hinrikus (Wise, formerly TransferWise), Harold Primat (investor in disrupter brands and former professional racing driver), and the co-founders of Runtastic. Camilla Dolan of Eka Ventures will join the board alongside the app’s founders Kevin Shanahan and Diego López.
Paired is a fun, evidence-based app that prompts daily conversations between partners. Since launching in October 2020 it has more than 5,000 paying subscribers, with growing audiences in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. An independent evaluation of the app by The Open University and the University of Brighton published in March 2021 found that couples using Paired see a 36% increase in the quality of their relationship in just three months. It demonstrated that Paired has a significant positive impact on communication, dealing with conflict, feeling connected, and comfort discussing sex life.
The investment will accelerate the company’s global growth ambitions and scale up its product development efforts, giving users personalised recommendations based on their relationship interests and needs. With dating apps generating revenue of more than $3 billion in 2020 alone, the market is now ripe for relationship apps such as Paired to help couples make their relationship last.
“I’m delighted by the support of our investors to bring relationship care to more couples,” comments Paired’s co-founder Kevin Shanahan. “I developed Paired because my own experience was that while we have a tool to treat relationship distress, which is couples therapy or counselling, we’re lacking tools to promote healthy relationship behaviours and prevent problems from arising in the first place. We know that people are relying on technology to find love – in 2020 a third of US adults used a dating app or site. I believe we’ll soon see a shift towards people using technology to help them stay in love too.”
Camilla Dolan from Eka Ventures said: “If you ask most people what the key to their happiness is, they are likely to say good relationships! And the most important among these is often their relationship with their partner. Despite relationship health being such an important and truly global part of our lives there is not currently an accessible and affordable way of supporting it – Paired has set out to change that. We love Kevin & Diego’s vision to bring happiness and health to relationships and be the global category leader for relationship management. What really got us excited though was the Paired user stories and the level of change that Paired is already having on their early users.”
Existing investor Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, adds: “Kevin and the Paired team have a vision for improving the relationships of hundreds of millions of couples. Building and strengthening relationships is something we all need help with from time to time, but lots of people feel unsure of where to turn for help. The rapid uptake from paid subscribers since their October launch makes me confident that it can become the global, digital platform for relationships.”
