Justin McLeod, who stepped down as Hinge’s CEO in December 2025, has raised $18 million to launch Overtone, a new AI-driven matchmaking service he insists is fundamentally different from the swipe-based apps that made his name.
The funding round includes backing from FirstMark Capital, Pace Capital, and, notably, Hinge parent Match Group, which also owns Tinder and OkCupid, news portal TechCrunch reported on Tuesday, citing Mcleod’s blog.
Relationship expert Esther Perel has joined Overtone’s board alongside Match CEO Spencer Rascoff and leadership advisor Diana Chapman, according to the announcement.
McLeod has been explicit about distancing Overtone from the category he helped build.
“Overtone is not a dating app,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the raise. He elaborated that the service won’t reduce people to “stats, quotes and photos”. Instead, McLeod describes Overtone as “a voice- and audio-forward service, enabled by AI, that provides highly curated introductions”.
The company plans to build deep profiles of users based on spoken interviews rather than static text bios.
As McLeod put it, the service aims to “get to know each person deeply, learning about them in their own voice”, and to deliver only a small number of introductions it believes are genuinely worth making.
McLeod also explained Overtone as a return to older matchmaking traditions, where introductions came from people who knew both parties, combined with the scale of modern technology and research-backed relationship science. He argued that dating apps solved for choice and reach but left people to search alone.
The launch comes as dissatisfaction with existing dating apps runs high, TechCrunch noted. A 2024 Forbes Health survey cited found that 78% of dating app users reported feeling burned out.
Overtone is not alone in betting on curated, AI-assisted pairing over open swiping pools. Startups Ditto and Date Drop are pursuing similar models, matching users directly rather than presenting them with large pools to sift through.
Overtone will launch later this year, though only in select, unspecified locations, said McLeod’s blog.
The company has opened a waitlist for early access.
Hinge’s parallel moves
On the same day as the Overtone news, Hinge announced a global rollout of ‘Friend’s Take’, which lets daters invite up to 10 Hinge users they know to submit short testimonials, photos, voice notes or videos responding to specific prompts.
Submissions are capped at 150 characters, require the profile owner’s approval before going live, and up to three can be displayed at once, Bloomberg reported.
Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos said the feature is meant to push people to engage with a profile more substantively rather than “like a module of content”.
“The biggest opportunity here is to help people fill out a rich profile,” she said.
Friend’s Take follows other recent Hinge additions, including Date Ideas, which suggests time-bound activities like a walk or coffee, and a “thoughtful” behaviour badge — a purple heart — awarded to users who consistently engage with profiles in good faith. Jantos said the features collectively signal the company’s current focus, even as Match Group, through its investment in Overtone, is simultaneously backing the bet that some daters may want to leave the app model behind entirely.
