The former Tinder executive Taru Kapoor is building Rivet around a simple idea: finding the right person should not have to be a solo exercise. Its community-powered model lets people help one another discover connections they may have otherwise swiped past.

For years, online dating has largely been designed around one person, one screen and one decision at a time.

You browse. You swipe. You match. Or you move on.

Taru Kapoor is betting that the next meaningful shift in dating may come from doing the opposite.

Her new platform, Rivet, is built around the idea that people should not have to search for love alone. Instead, friends, acquaintances and even people who are not dating themselves can help surface connections for others.

Rivet describes itself as the “world’s first dating network”, built around what the company calls Social Matching, a proprietary approach that uses recommendations from real people to identify potential matches.

The underlying philosophy is simple: people often see compatibility differently from algorithms, and sometimes differently from the two people looking at each other on a dating app.

In Rivet’s world, dating becomes less about endlessly evaluating profiles alone and more about letting a wider group of people weigh in on who might actually click.

A dating app where you do not have to be dating

One of Rivet’s most distinctive features is that people can join the platform even if they are not looking for a relationship themselves.

These users participate as Matchers.

A Matcher looks at potential pairings and recommends introductions they believe could work. Those recommendations contribute to what Rivet calls a Social Matching score.

When a potential pairing receives a sufficiently high score, the two individuals are introduced. Each person then independently decides whether they want to match and begin a conversation.

That means someone who is already in a relationship, taking a break from dating or simply enjoys bringing people together can still participate meaningfully in the network.

It is an unusual departure from the conventional dating-app model, where almost every user is there primarily to find something for themselves.

Rivet instead introduces a second reason to open the app: helping somebody else.

The company describes this as a “give-to-get” approach, where members contribute recommendations for others while also benefiting from the collective judgement of the wider community.

Taru Kapoor is returning to dating with a different thesis

Rivet is co-founded by Taru Kapoor, who previously spent close to a decade working across Tinder and other Match Group brands in the US, Europe and Asia, and Rajat Sahni, who previously held senior roles at CarDekho, including leading its used-car business.

Kapoor’s experience gives the startup an unusual vantage point.

She has already spent years inside the modern online-dating ecosystem. Rivet is not a first-time outsider’s critique of dating apps. It is a new product being built by someone who has seen how large-scale dating platforms work from the inside.

Her starting point is that dating has historically been social.

“Dating has always been social,” Kapoor said in the company’s launch announcement, while arguing that dating apps expanded the pool of people users could meet but also made the process more transactional.

Rivet is attempting to bring some of that social layer back.

Instead of asking technology to make every judgement, the platform combines technology with human recommendations.

The company’s broader belief is that people understand chemistry and compatibility in ways that cannot always be reduced to an algorithm.

That does not mean Rivet removes individual choice.

Even after other people recommend a pairing, both individuals still decide for themselves whether they want to connect.

The crowd can suggest. The people involved still choose.

Why Social Matching is the centre of the product

Most dating platforms are built around personal discovery.

Rivet is built around collective discovery.

The difference matters because the platform is not simply adding a friend-referral feature on top of an existing swipe experience. Community participation is central to how potential introductions are surfaced.

Users can participate purely as Matchers, while potential couples are introduced after receiving support from the community.

The model tries to recreate something that already happens naturally offline.

A friend notices two people have similar personalities. A colleague thinks two acquaintances would get along. Someone at a dinner says, “You should meet this person.”

Rivet is effectively trying to turn that instinct into a product.

Its proposition can be summed up in one line the company uses to describe the idea: Let people find your person.

Rivet enters a crowded dating market with a different behaviour to build

Rivet is entering a market that already includes established platforms such as Tinder, Hinge and Bumble.

Other dating products have also experimented with involving friends and communities in matchmaking.

Rivet’s difference lies in making that participation foundational to the experience rather than peripheral.

That also gives the company a distinct product challenge.

It has to persuade users not only to search for themselves, but to spend time helping other people.

If that behaviour works at scale, Rivet could function less like a traditional dating app and more like a network where matchmaking becomes a shared activity.

That is a significantly different social dynamic from the solitary swipe.

The $10.5 million round is fuel for the larger experiment

The funding story comes into the picture here.

Rivet has raised $10.5 million in seed funding from Peak XV Partners, Shine Capital and Blume Ventures.

The company announced the round alongside its nationwide US launch on September 24.

The capital is expected to support product development, distribution and expansion across the United States. Rivet is a product of New York-based MeantToBe Inc., while much of its engineering and machine learning team is based in Delhi NCR.

Rivet also counts Elie Seidman, former CEO of Tinder and OkCupid, among its early investors. The startup says Seidman advised Kapoor during the company’s development.

The platform is currently available in the United States and can be downloaded on iOS and Android.

The Future Ahead

The most interesting part of Rivet is not the size of its seed round.

It is the behaviour the company is trying to create.

Online dating has spent years optimising how individuals discover one another. Rivet is asking whether discovery becomes better when other people are invited into that process.

Its bet is that a friend, a stranger or a wider community may notice compatibility that a user would miss while scrolling alone.

That makes Rivet’s experiment larger than simply launching another dating app.

It is trying to answer a different question: What if finding love worked better when everyone looked together?

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