The notorious dating website Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB), which is owned by the Kang brothers Dawoon, Arum, and Soo, gained its notoriety when the owners rejected a $30 million offer from the billionaire Mark Cuban. It turned out that the ladies’ decision to turn down the offer was correct. It is anticipated that Coffee Meets Bagel would have a value of $150 million by the year 2022. Given that they compete in such a cutthroat sector, their value is rather astounding.
Who founded it?
Sisters Dawoon, Arum, and Soo Kang moved to the United States while they were in their adolescent years. They were provided with an education of the highest caliber in the United States. Dawoon attended Parsons School of Design, while Soo and Arum both received their degrees from Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively.
They were talking about the challenges of meeting people via online dating one day, and it came up in their conversation. They came to the conclusion that there were more cutting-edge approaches to operating a dating app that may give better matches. The concept for Coffee Meets Bagel was developed in this manner. The Kang siblings each had jobs that paid well, but they made the decision to leave them in order to give their business plan a greater shot at being successful.
The prospective businesswomen traveled to San Francisco, in the state of California, in order to acquire all of the technological tools they need for the launch of an internet platform. CMB was finished being created in a little over a year.
The application was made available to the public in 2012 after Lightbank and a co-founder of Match.com contributed a total of $600,000 to its funding. It differentiated itself from its rivals by selecting consumers based on the data collected from their Facebook profiles using a machine learning algorithm. Users are given the opportunity to see possible matches once a day at noon. They were able to differentiate themselves from competitors such as Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder thanks to their novel strategy.
They saw a meteoric rise in both their customer base and their income, both of which skyrocketed. Nevertheless, the firm, just like any other early startup, battled with cash flow and was losing one million dollars annually. As a result of this, the company’s founders intended to seek assistance from angel investors.
Shark Tank
They put up an application to present their company on Shark Tank, and in 2015, they got their chance to do so. Dawoon, Arum, and Soo During the broadcast, they were offering $500,000 in return for 5% of their company’s shares in exchange for the money. This gave the online dating service an estimated worth of $10 million at the time.
Because of this, they and the other contestants on Shark Tank had a contentious conversation. It went on to become one of the most famous pitches of the whole series. Mark Cuban, who is worth billions of dollars, was interested in the deal even though the other Sharks thought it was too dangerous.
In the end, he put forth an offer to purchase the whole CMB brand for $30 million, which is widely regarded as the most significant financial offer that has ever been made on Shark Tank. On the other hand, the sisters considered that the offer was inadequate given that CMB had the opportunity to combat against Match.com, which at the time was generating an annual revenue of $800 million.
Following their appearance on “Shark Tank,” the founders of Coffee Meets Bagel went on the hunt for more investors in order to raise capital. They have completed five investment rounds, resulting in a total capital amount of nearly $23.2 million. Atami Capital and DCM Ventures are their primary backers at the moment.
Unfortunately, they stated in February 2019 that their website had been hacked and that the personal information of over 6.1 million people had been compromised. The next year, they gradually began to recover by introducing a function known as video virtual speed dating.
CMB, in general, is having trouble competing with other dating apps such as Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble in terms of attracting new users. At the moment, CMB is positioned in the top 15 and 20 of the most popular dating sites. The application may still be downloaded on iOS and Android devices, and it is believed to have a total user base of about 10 million individuals.
