This Startup Lets AI Do The ‘Match-Making’ For People!

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In the era of swiping right and left, in case if there is a room of feeling tedious and monotonous, technology comes to your aid. In fact, steps ahead and finds you a suitable partner. Complying with the name quite aptly, Betterhalf.ai is an AI startup that has been adopting Artificial Intelligence to do the potential matchmaking.

In an email interaction with Express Computer’s Gairika Mitra, CEO of Betterhalf.ai, Pawan Gupta talks about donning the entrepreneurial hat, and how technology has been the game-changer over the days. 

Edited excerpts:

As per the recent research by Accenture, AI has the potential to add $957 billion to the economy. How do you think ‘Betterhalf.ai’ has been contributing to it?

Betterhalf.ai is the first product in India to arrange love marriages with algorithms. Unlike traditional matrimonial sites like Shaadi.com, Jeevansathi, and Bharatmatrimony, Betterhalf offers the first control to 10M Indians with verified and content-rich profiles, network of working professions between the age of 25-35 who are serious to get married and a safety net for females to curb creepy or non-serious users. 

We have done over 100K matches, 5000 dates last year and between 50-100 marriages last year. Today, we have the world’s fastest onboarding for any matrimonial application in the world and advanced algorithms in place to match two relevant people that cut down 90% of their time they invest in browsing profiles and poor interactions that go nowhere.

We are launching a brand new app in a couple of months with a stunning new design, fastest way to register profiles and see matches and verification features keeping female security as the topmost priority in mind. 

On the overall $1B online and offline matchmaking industry in India, Betterhalf intends to become a market leader and contribute 20% of it 

What is the algorithm of AI used in ‘Betterhalf.ai’ that distinguishes it from other big players in the market?

With a well-integrated AI in place, we match people based on their personality which includes their hobbies, likes and dislikes, their perception towards major factors in life by asking them to fill a questionnaire that feeds as the data for AI. Betterhalf AI engine is focused on six personality dimensions: relationships, social, intellectual, emotional, values and physical level. 

A person is matched based on their individual compatibility score (87% on emotional, 91% on intellectual, 73% on values, etc.) as well as overall compatibility score (88% total compatibility). As users interact with the matches and the compatibility percentage gets more attuned to the user’s preferences, it provides more personalized matches over time.

Talking about finances, Betterhalf has already received seed funding of USD 500k from various angel investors from Google India and Flipkart. Any plans for raising funds soon again?

We have successfully raised $1.2M from investors including Shailesh Rao, Former MD of Google India and Partner of TPG Capital ($2.1B fund) and Vinay Subramanian, Partner at Stakeboat Capital ($200M fund) and Rehan A Khan, MIT & HBS Alumni, and Investor at FirstPenguin Capital. There are other MIT Alumni involved as well who have scaled the company from an early stage to IPO.

At this stage, we are focused on the new product launch and will plan on the timing for the next round of funding this year.

Tell us about your scaling plans and immediate milestones Betterhalf looks forward to achieving. 

We’re introducing the world’s fastest onboarding in AI prediction which will reduce the current onboarding/registering time on the app from 6-7 minutes to under 30 seconds which will be a big milestone in cracking the industry’s issue of low activation rates. Stay tuned for a couple of months.

This year, we would be scaling the app to the first 1M users and go on setting the roadmap for the next 10M years in the coming years.

Lastly, any key learning for wannabe entrepreneurs? Would you like to reveal the secret sauce for success for our entrepreneurs to pick up?

There is no secret sauce per se in my opinion.

The analogy is you are trying to create a new system of the team that is focused on everything to make the product successful, however, nature forces are always against you. Anything can go wrong like user needs not being captured well in the product, financials, organization culture, team leadership 

Any entrepreneur needs a focused and healthy mind with the right leadership at every level to make sure forces of creation are many folds say 10 times more than the forces of destruction. That’s when a system can survive.

At Betterhalf, I talk about this force law often!

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