Funding

The Dating App That Refused Mark Cuban's $30 Million Buyout Offer Just Raised $7.8 Million in Funding

February 18, 2015 2 min read

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By this point, the online dating market is beyond saturated (there are now apps expressly for gluten free, farmer and yoga-loving singles). So it's notable that amongst all the chatter, Coffee Meets Bagel -- an app that provides its users with one quality match per day using friends-of-friends on Facebook – so impressed Mark Cuban that he offered to buy the company outright for a cool $30 million on a recent episode of Shark Tank.

Whether or not the offer was real or just a hypothetical didn't end up mattering in the end: Coffee Meets Bagel's founders -- sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang – gave Cuban a hard no, confident that their company was destined for greater things."We see this business growing as a big as Match.com," Dawoon told Cuban. "They're becoming a billion-dollar-revenue company, and we think this model and the product has potential to be as big as Match."

Today, Coffee Meets Bagel – which already raised $2.8 million from investors including Match.com cofounder Peng Ong -- announced that it has closed a $7.8 million Series A financing round, TechCrunch reports, led by existing investor DCM Ventures with participation from Quest Venture Partners and Azure Capital.

According to the outlet, the cash infusion will be used to staff up, and hire additional developers and engineers.

Instead of matching users with a hoard of nearby strangers a la Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel only connects singles who share Facebook friends; What's more, it eliminates the onslaught of unwanted creepy messages all-too-common on dating sites such as OKCupid by sending each of its users a single match each day at noon and only allowing individuals who mutually like each other to communicate.

Or as Dawoon summed it up for the Sharks, "we took the proven concept of daily flash-sale sights and merged it with social networking elements to create the highest quality dating service for singles."

Watch the full video of the sisters pitching Coffee Meets Bagel to the Sharks below.

Correction: An earlier version of this article failed to convey that Cuban's offer may have been hypothetical.

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