Hinge CEO steps down to launch Overtone, an AI dating app

Summary

Hinge CEO Justin McLeod is stepping down from his role to launch a new AI dating product called Overtone. Match Group, the dating giant that owns apps like Hinge, Tinder, and OkCupid, is backing Overtone with pre-seed financing and plans to take a “substantial ownership position,” according to a press release. With Match’s support, Overtone was incubated as a project inside of Hinge. McLeod and a dedicated team spent the year developing the idea of Overtone, which is described as “an early-stage dating service focused on using AI and voice tools to help people connect in a more thoughtful and personal way.” McLeod isn’t the only dating app founder branching out into new, standalone AI experiences. Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, said she wants to use AI to make “the world’s smartest and most emotionally intelligent matchmaker in existence.” Somewhat infamously, Wolfe Herd proposed the idea last year of singles using AI to stand-in for themselves and date other people’s AIs. It’s not yet clear how Overtone will differentiate itself from other dating apps, which have been experimenting with AI features to compensate for the market’s growing malaise with online dating — especially among Gen Z. Tinder has reported nine straight quarters of paying-subscriber declines and has leaned into AI with features that are supposed to help users get more matches. Hinge launched another AI feature just this week called “Convo Starters,” which is supposed to help daters come up with more interesting things to say than the usual small talk. Tinder and Facebook Dating have each experimented with AI-powered matching to combat “swipe fatigue.” Ceding control of your dating experience is one thing, but other attempts at integrating AI into these apps get even more dubious. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 Match CEO Spencer Rascoff said last month that a “major pillar of Tinder’s upcoming 2026 product experience” will be a feature called Chemistry. With the user’...