Dating app Cerca will show how Gen Z really dates at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Summary

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the current dating scene sucks, no matter what city you live in. Everyone has a story. And everyone has a grievance. Take Myles Slayton, for example, who completed a banking internship in New York City and saw how he and his friends struggled to find significant others in the city’s ruthless dating scene. “We’re on our phones more than ever,” he told TechCrunch. ”I thought to myself, ‘Why are dating apps terrible?’” He figured that it must not be a problem with dating apps, per se, but rather the way the product is working these days. Many of the popular dating apps were built with millennials in mind, but his generation, Gen Z, operates in a completely different fashion, he said. It’s a throwback to how dating used to be: People of this generation meet “through mutuals, through people in our social circles,” he said. He teamed up with friends Willy Conzelman and Carter Munk and just a few months ago launched Cerca, a dating app that matches people with others already in their social circles. The company announced a $1.6 million seed round this summer and already has the people buzzing: The app has around 60,000 users, mainly now in New York and scattered across universities. The company is part of Startup Battlefield and will show off its tech at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 later this month in San Francisco. Image Credits:Cerca Slayton, the company’s CEO, said there is a reason Gen Z has retreated to the old ways of dating, and that’s because of the internet and the COVID pandemic. “We simply don’t trust strangers,” he said, adding that people are also deeply afraid of rejection. Cerca’s product tries to address this. Users create a standard dating profile, sync their contacts, and from there, only friends or friends of friends already on the app are shown as potential matches. “The fear of strangers is eliminated,” Slayton said. All likes are anonymous, ridding the fear of rejection. Users get four swipes a day, he said, in t...