India’s crowded dating app market may be inching towards a shift beyond swipes. Bengaluru-based Schmooze, a Gen Z-focused dating platform, has launched an AI-powered personal matchmaker, signalling a new approach to how young users discover potential partners.
The feature, called ‘Riya’, uses conversational voice AI to interact with users, understand their personality, and recommend matches based on deeper compatibility signals rather than surface-level preferences.
Founded by a Stanford Business School alumna, Vidya Madhavan and Abhinav Anurag, Elevation Capital backed Schmooze uses a meme-led matching format where users swipe on memes, not photos, to gauge humour and personality. With the launch of Riya, the startup is now betting on AI to address one of online dating’s biggest pain points, finding meaningful matches in a sea of profiles.
The move comes as India’s dating apps market is projected to grow to $1.42 Bn by 2030 from $788 Mn in 2024, driven largely by Gen Z users, even as global players like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge dominate user mindshare.
Schmooze, which also got featured on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, claims that over 300K users have already interacted with Riya as part of a phased rollout. “We are also seeing that retention among users of the personal matchmaker is now 2X higher,” said cofounder Vidya Madhavan.
The AI assistant engages users in natural, voice-led conversations, ranging from casual questions about their weekends to deeper discussions around values, lifestyle, and relationship goals, before suggesting matches tailored to their preferences. Notably, Schmooze has built its own voice AI stack and an underlying large language model, fine-tuned on dating-specific data, with the aim of reducing costs while maintaining greater control over user privacy.
Moving Beyond Swipes: Schmooze’s AI Bet
At its core, Schmooze is attempting to move away from the swipe-based model that has defined dating apps for over a decade. While platforms like Tinder and Bumble rely heavily on photos and short bios, Schmooze has focused on personality-first matching, initially through memes and now via AI-led conversations.
The idea for Riya stemmed from an earlier AI feature, ‘People Finder’, where users entered highly specific partner preferences. “People were extremely particular, typing things like ‘extrovert who works in tech and likes to cook’ or ‘6 ft, chiselled jaw, Malayali, prefers to laze in their free time’,” said Madhavan. The insight: while some users are open to random matches, others have sharply defined expectations that existing apps struggle to capture effectively.
Riya aims to bridge this gap by replacing manual filtering with active, voice-based discovery. The AI captures nuanced preferences such as humour style, communication patterns, and family orientation through one-on-one conversations. In some cases, the company claims users spent 40-50 minutes interacting with the assistant, even seeking advice on date ideas, prompting Schmooze to expand into personalised recommendations.
This approach also aligns with broader Gen Z behaviour, where interacting with AI assistants is increasingly normalised, positioning Schmooze as a more intuitive alternative to swipe-heavy platforms.
Competition, however, remains intense with players like Bumble, Tinder, Hinge and Aisle, who are experimenting with differentiated formats including compatibility quizzes, human-assisted matchmaking and swipe-and-bio models.
Schmooze, however, is leaning on its data advantage with over 5 Mn users and 3.5 Bn+ meme swipes to refine its understanding of user preferences. The company claims a relatively balanced gender ratio of 3:1 (male-to-female), significantly better than many mainstream platforms, where skewed ratios often affect user experience.
As dating apps grapple with user fatigue and declining engagement from repetitive swiping, Schmooze’s conversational AI could signal the next phase of the category’s evolution. Whether conversational matchmaking can deliver on its promise of deeper compatibility at scale remains to be seen, but for now, the startup is betting that users are ready to trade swipes for conversations.
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