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Tinder owner Match Group is slowing hiring to pay for its increased use of AI tools
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You might think the big story out of Match Group’s first-quarter earnings is Tinder’s turnaround. The dating app’s revenue is slightly up again after quarter-after-quarter of declines. But we’d like to point to a comment the chief financial officer made about how the company is slowing its hiring right now because it needs more money to pay for AI tools for its employees. Ah, yes, the good ol’ “let’s blame AI” strategy! While speaking to analysts on the first-quarter earnings call, Match Group CFO Steven Bailey talked about how the dating app giant was investing in AI technology for internal use at the company — as well as how Match was paying for it. “We’re making a big push around AI enablement. We’re giving every employee in the company access to all the cutting-edge tools. We’re giving them the training they need to succeed. We’re setting expectations. We really want to become an AI-native company,” Bailey said. “We think it’s a huge opportunity. But these tools cost a lot of money, as I’m sure you know, and so the way we’re helping to pay for that is by slowing our hiring plans for the rest of the year,” he added. The company assured investors that the impact would be cost-neutral, as the slowed hiring and lower headcount would make up for the increased software expenses. Plus, Match Group is betting that the increased productivity from employees’ use of AI will ultimately increase revenue growth, the number-cruncher explained. While on the surface, this looks like another example of AI taking people’s jobs — in this case, forcing a company to lower its number of open positions — there’s likely more nuance to this story. Let’s keep in mind that Match Group’s flagship app, Tinder, has been struggling in recent years. This quarter may be the start of a turnaround, as monthly active users declined by 7% in March compared with the far-steeper 10% drop a year ago. Tinder registrations also grew for the first time since 2024, but by a mere 1%, as Bloomberg pointed out. This is perhaps a positive sign for Tinder. Or it might be a brief blip driven by users’ curiosity around various product improvements and new features, like IRL events. Time will tell. Dating meets a generational shift Match Group remains a company that has to work to squeeze more money out of an oft-dwindling, less active user base — which, to the company’s credit, it did exactly that. Match’s revenue was $864 million in the first quarter, up 4% year-over-year. However, its next-quarter estimates are coming in lower — around $850-$860 million, down 2% to flat year-over-year. All these struggles come after many months of what appears to be a growing disinterest in the use of dating apps by younger people. This generational shift sees people opting to meet up in real-life, perhaps by pursuing an interest, like running, book clubs, or a hobby that connects them with other people, which then, in turn, expands their network, increasing their chance of meeting someone new. The trend coincides with a resurgence of nostalgic tech, like digital cameras, flip phones, boomboxes, and even landlines, signaling a generation that’s feeling burned out by always-on connectivity and looking for analog pleasures. Match Group is aware of this significant shift and says it’s pivoting to address the challenge by increasing the number of its own IRL events. “Gen Z desperately wants to connect. They know they want to meet new people. They just want to do it in a low-pressure, low-stakes way that doesn’t feel like a job interview,” Match’s CFO Rascoff told investors on the call. “Traditional dating apps are very highly structured and can be intimidating to a user under 30. So, I think the growth of these alternative ways to meet new people speaks to how Gen Z is trying to find lower-pressure ways to connect.” “We’ve obviously adapted our roadmap to this reality,” he said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affe
TikTok is launching a new “Campus Hub,” the company told TechCrunch in an email on Thursday. The new hub features dedicated college group chats and personalized feeds designed to help students stay connected with their campus communities, even while they’re away for the summer. The new hub builds on the app’s campus verification feature, which launched last August and lets users add their college campus to their TikTok profile and browse a list of students at their school in order to find and connect with others on their campus. The feature is available across more than 6,000 universities through TikTok’s partnership with UNiDAYS, a student verification platform that confirms student status. Once users confirm their student status, they will get access to their new dedicated campus hub. Students can create and join group chats with up to 300 classmates. These group chats are exclusive to verified students at the same school. TikTok says these chats can be used to stay in touch, plan reunions, or keep conversations going over the summer. Image Credits:TikTok / While these chats could be useful for the summer, TikTok may also be aiming to get students to use its app for everyday school communication, like class or club discussions that typically take place on other platforms such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram. As for the new college feeds, users will see a personalized feed that surfaces a mix of content posted by verified students and content related to their university. TikTok says these feeds will allow students to stay plugged into campus life, trends, and updates from wherever they may be. The new features are reminiscent of Facebook’s early days, when the platform was built entirely around college campuses and required people to sign up with a valid “.edu” email address in order to connect with classmates and meet people at their university. It’s worth noting that TikTok isn’t the only social media giant looking to make it easier for college students to connect with each other, as Meta-owned Instagram rolled out a feature last year that’s nearly identical to TikTok’s campus verification feature, as it also allows students in the U.S. to add their college or university to their profile banner and browse a list of students at their school. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. You can contact or verify outreach from Aisha by emailing aisha@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at aisha_malik.01 on Signal. View Bio
Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat together in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Think Discord, but with AI characters alongside humans. Founded in 2022, Shapes has more than 400,000 monthly active users. The app’s founders, Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, believe that Shapes can address issues around “AI Psychosis,” which refers to cases where prolonged interactions with AI chatbots or AI companions can cause individuals to develop delusions or paranoia. Instead of isolating people with one-on-one interactions with AI, Shapes allows people to connect with AI within their everyday interactions with real people. “Today, all of our conversations with AI are very private and one-on-one, but that’s not really how humans collaborate and communicate with each other,” Shapes CEO Mittal told TechCrunch in an interview. “Our lives run on group chats. That’s where we spend all of our time. That’s where we talk and communicate with each other. It’s just natural to bring in AI into those same conversations where AI has all of the context and is readily available to help you.” In the app, AI characters, called “Shapes,” are viewed as any other user and can interact in all the same ways humans can. They’re clearly labeled as “Shapes” for transparency, but they aren’t restricted. Users can create their own Shapes and set their personalities. The company says users have already created three million Shapes to add into group chats. Many Shapes are rooted in fandom, as the app serves as a way for fans to deep-dive on subculture and meet other fans. When users sign up for the app, they’re asked to choose their interests so the app can recommend a selection of group chats they might be interested in joining. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 Image Credits:Shapes / While some may question the need for adding AI into group chats, Mittal and Dhingra believe one of the main reasons group chats die is that some participants don’t want to be the first person to send a message. Shapes solves this, as AI agents can initiate conversations and play a key role in keeping them going. Additionally, users don’t have to worry about not getting a response to their messages because Shapes will always acknowledge and respond to them. Unlike AI companions on other apps that need to be summoned, Shapes have free will and can decide when to message. It’s worth noting that although the popular chatbot ChatGPT already allows AI and humans to converse in group chats, those conversations operate differently from Shapes. For example, when you create a group chat in ChatGPT, it’s mostly for planning or brainstorming. On Shapes, however, it’s all about social, community-style interactions with AI characters that have various personalities. The startup is aware that not everyone will want to bring AI into their group conversations, which is why the app is designed for a specific type of online user. “Shapes is about human conversations,” Mittal said. “It’s more of a next-gen chat app than an AI app. The demographic is people who are obsessively online, who spend a lot of time online connecting and sharing. Those are the users who come in and they get an opportunity to obsess about their interests, and the AI acts as a facilitator in those conversations.” Shapes’ growth has been driven by word of mouth, Mittal says, with the app seeing a sixfold increase in users since the start of the year. The company also says that thousands of users spend two to four hours in the app each day. As for the new funding, the company plans to use it to accelerate development and user acquisition. The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and angel investors. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior
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