// TECHCRUNCH — MODA & SOCIETÀ
Grindr wants to be the everything app for gay men; investors are still deciding whether it can pull it off
When George Arison took over Grindr in 2022, he inherited a company that had been bounced from Chinese ownership to a forced divestiture to a private-equity rescue — a business that was printing money but also had no real product or business strategy. Four years, a SPAC listing, and a controversial return-to-office mandate later, Grindr has become convincing as a growth story. Revenue is on pace to roughly triple, from $195 million in 2022 to a guided $540 million-plus this year, with adjusted EBITDA margins holding above 40%.
That growth has come almost entirely from getting existing customers to pay more versus dramatically growing its user base. In the second quarter of this year, it had 1.4 million paying users, or 9% of its user base, but average revenue per user has risen considerably since 2022, and Arison is very focused on where the next leg of growth comes from. Part of that plan includes turning Grindr into a “gayborhood in your pocket” — a platform that handles not just dating and hookups but healthcare (from ED medication to HIV prevention to, eventually, connecting users with gay doctors) and travel (helping users find community wherever they land). It’s the same “everything app” instinct driving much of consumer tech right now.
But that’s not the only thing Arison is throwing against the wall; later this year, Grindr is rolling out a subscription that it’s betting the market will support, a far pricier “EDGE” tier that has already raised hackles from some on the internet (“literally who’s paying for this,” and “we need 2012 grindr back”).
Arison, who previously founded and ran Shift Technologies, the online used-car marketplace he also took public via a SPAC, in 2020, is also aggressively seeking out press to argue that institutional investors continue discounting Grindr’s stock simply because it’s a gay dating app. In a Zoom call with TechCrunch on Thursday, he cited an investor who once showed him a financial model with a literal “Grindr discount” line item, knocking 25% off a fair-value estimate.
Not everyone thinks the discount is justified. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Raymond James have all raised their price targets on the stock this year, and Morgan Stanley upgraded it to “overweight” in July, citing the EDGE tier and Grindr’s telehealth push — part of a run-up that’s seen the stock climb roughly a third over the past six months. Still, that discount isn’t Arison’s imagination — the stock trades at roughly 11 times 2027 EBITDA, about a 35% discount to peers — even if it’s not clear why.
Arison — amiable, with a hint of his native Georgia still in his voice — was game to talk about all of it in a Q&A that has been edited for clarity and length.
You came in to run Grindr in 2022 when it was pretty adrift. What was the first thing you wanted to prioritize?
Three things, really. First, company building. A lot of people had been hired during the peak-COVID era when expectations for in-office productivity were low, and average output was maybe three to four hours of real work a day. We brought people back to the office two days a week in the summer of 2023 — a decision that got a lot of press and a lot of anger. We went down to about 70 employees as a result. Today only around 25 people who were here before I arrived still work at Grindr, and we run lean: 175 U.S. employees plus a team in Colombia, doing $540 million in guided revenue this year.
Second was driving revenue growth by shipping product people would actually pay for — that’s how pay conversion went from under 6% to over 9%, and ARPU nearly doubled. Third was setting a long-term vision: the “gayborhood in your pocket” idea, and everything else — healthcare, travel — that flows from it.
You’ve said Grindr’s engineering culture is underrated. How small is the team actually running this?