Rivet raises $10.5M Seed

The round was announced alongside a nationwide US launch on September 24. Peak XV Partners, Shine Capital and Blume Ventures backed it. Former Tinder and OkCupid CEO Elie Seidman is also an early investor. The money is earmarked for product development, distribution and US expansion. Valuation has not been reported. The product is run by MeantToBe, Inc., from New York, with an office in Delhi NCR. Much of its engineering and machine learning team is based in India. The mechanics: an algorithm proposes pairs, volunteer Matchers vote on them, and high-scoring pairs are introduced. Each person then decides independently whether to match. People who are not dating can join purely as matchers. Founders are Taru Kapoor, a former Tinder and Match Group executive, and Rajat Sahni, formerly of CarDekho. Rivet competes with Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, The League and Wingman. For AI founders, the design is a reminder that a model can generate candidates while human judgment supplies the final signal. Rivet's matchers double as a supply of labeled data and a distribution channel. The risk is the cold-start problem: the product needs enough volunteers to rate pairs before daters see value.