When George Arison took over Grindr in 2022, he inherited a company that had moved from Chinese ownership to a forced divestiture and then to private equity, a business that was profitable but lacked a clear product strategy. Four years, a SPAC listing, and a return-to-office mandate later, Grindr presents a clearer growth story. According to the company’s filings and investor guidance, revenue is on pace to roughly triple, from $195 million in 2022 to a guided $540 million-plus this year, with adjusted EBITDA margins above 40%.
That growth has come mainly from existing customers paying more, rather than a large jump in the user base. In the second quarter, the company reported 1.4 million paying users, about 9% of total users, while average revenue per user has risen significantly since 2022. Arison is focused on where the next leg of growth will come from. Part of the plan is to turn Grindr into what he calls a “gayborhood in your pocket,” an app that handles dating and hookups as well as health services, from erectile dysfunction medication to HIV prevention, and travel, helping users find community when they travel. This is similar to the move by other consumer platforms to add adjacent services within a single app.
Later this year, Grindr plans to roll out a higher-priced subscription tier called EDGE. The test pricing quoted online in some markets drew criticism from users, and some wrote that they wanted the older version of the app back. The company says EDGE sits above its existing XTRA (about $23.99) and Unlimited (about $44.99) tiers, and that current trials show higher retention for the features being tested. In a Zoom call with Lakbima News, Arison said the company ran a range of test prices to measure elasticity, and that a final price will be set when the product launches to more users toward the end of this year or early next.
Arison, who founded Shift Technologies and took that company public via a SPAC in 2020, has also pushed a narrative that institutional investors apply a discount to Grindr because it is a gay dating app. In the call with Lakbima News, he described an investor who included a line item labeled “Grindr discount” that reduced fair-value estimates by 25 percent.
Not all market participants see a persistent stigma. Broker reports from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Raymond James raised price targets this year, and Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock to overweight in July, citing the EDGE tier and the company’s telehealth initiatives, according to those firms’ research notes. The stock has risen about a third over the past six months. Still, public comparables show the shares trade at roughly 11 times 2027 EBITDA, near a 35 percent discount to peers, a gap the company and some analysts have noted without a single clear explanation.
Arison, who speaks with a trace of his native Georgia in his voice, answered questions in a Q&A that follows, edited for length and clarity.
You came in to run Grindr in 2022 when it was pretty adrift. What was the first thing you wanted to prioritize?
Three things. First, company building. Many people had been hired during peak COVID, when expectations for in-office productivity were low, and average output, by his estimate, was three to four hours of focused work a day. The company brought employees back to the office two days a week in the summer of 2023, a decision that drew criticism and led to head-count reduction to about 70. Today, roughly 25 people who were at Grindr before Arison arrived remain; the company now reports about 175 U.S. employees plus a team in Colombia, and the current guidance is for $540 million in revenue this year.
Second, drive revenue growth by shipping products people would pay for. That is how pay conversion moved from under 6 percent to over 9 percent, and ARPU nearly doubled, according to the company. Third, set a longer-term vision: the “gayborhood in your pocket” idea and related services such as healthcare and travel.
You’ve said Grindr’s engineering culture is underrated. How small is the team actually running this?
About 94 or 95 people across technical roles, he said. Arison relayed advice from another CEO that AI would allow the company to do with far fewer people what it once thought would require 300 to 350 engineers. “We’re doing roughly 350 people’s worth of work with about 100,” he said, and added that around 80 percent of the code is now AI written. The company reports a roughly 2.5x increase in engineering productivity over the past year.
Grindr tested an AI-powered premium tier, EDGE, at price points that, in a Canadian test, converted to roughly $350–375 a month in U.S. dollars, which drew online mockery. What actually happened there?
We haven’t released EDGE broadly, he said. Some users have access as part of tests. EDGE is designed to build on behavioral signals and consented data to deliver more relevant matches than a sparse profile. The company is not selling “AI” directly; it is selling features that come from models trained on user behavior. Retention on those features so far is higher than anything they’ve had before, Arison said. The pricing seen online was one test point; the company ran several price points to understand elasticity and will settle on a public price when the product launches.
On matching — you’ve described using AI to surface people outside someone’s home city because local pools can be small. What evidence do you have that long-distance matches lead anywhere?
Arison said even in cities with large gay populations, like San Francisco, the pool of gay men is limited. “You’re talking about maybe 50,000 to 60,000 gay people total,” he said, and that makes finding a partner difficult. He acknowledged the company does not track whether matches turn into long-term relationships, which he called beyond what the app should collect. The company does track where people report meeting partners, and Grindr remains a primary platform for many gay men to meet each other. Survey data, he said, shows younger cohorts report stronger interest in monogamy and parenting than previous generations did, and the common barrier cited by singles is difficulty finding a partner. “I can’t promise this solves that,” he said. “But it’s worth trying something different.”
There are many ways to expand beyond the dating app itself. Tell us more about the healthcare products and whether you are building these yourselves or acting as an interface to outside providers.
The company began with cash pay products under a line called Woodwork, selling ED medications, GLP‑1s, peptides, and similar items, because cash pay was the simplest starting point. Grindr recently launched an in-app bot that completes transactions without sending users to Woodwork. The second bucket is HIV prevention and treatment; the company has committed to providing 10 million people direct information about where to get PrEP, and already offers PrEP resources in its in-app health center in the U.S. The third bucket is clinical care, such as telehealth connections to clinicians, which Arison described as a long-term goal. He said he expects it could be a larger revenue stream a decade out, but it is not a current core business.
Right now, non-subscription revenue — advertising and new services including healthcare — is small relative to subscriptions. The company reports subscriptions make up about 83 percent of revenue today, down from around 86 percent in 2022 because the overall base has grown. Arison’s stated goal is a company that, over the next decade, has a strong subscription business alongside meaningful advertising, healthcare, and travel businesses; today those last two are early-stage.
You’ve said investors still apply what one called a “Grindr discount” to the stock. But the stock is up over the past six months, Morgan Stanley upgraded it, and the multiple compares favorably to Match Group. Isn’t the market saying the discount is gone?
Arison said he hopes the market now treats Grindr as a growth company — revenue has grown more than 25 percent for 16 straight quarters during his tenure, he noted. The stigma issue, he said, is real. A consulting firm declined to work with Grindr over reputational concerns, and a bank refused the company funds during the Silicon Valley Bank turmoil, he said, even as other large banks, including Goldman and Morgan Stanley, have been partners. “I think some of it is about Grindr being an app for gay men, rather than dating being controversial per se,” he said. He pointed out that competing apps face different scrutiny in the market.
The conversation with Arison was conducted over Zoom and edited for clarity. Where specifics above are drawn from corporate figures, they are attributed to Grindr’s filings and investor presentations or to analyst research notes cited by the brokerages mentioned.
