March 13, 2019
Growlr Picked Up for $12 Mil by Owner of Other Dating Apps
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 1 MIN.
The Meet Group, the company that owns dating apps MeetMe, LOVOO, Skout, and Tagged – as well as the social media app hi5 – has snapped up gay hookup app Growlr, reportedly paying just shy of $12 million for the acquisition.
Growlr, which has 200,000 users each day, touts itself as "the gay bear social network," and is geared toward bringing together bears and the men who love them. The acquisition comes more than a year after Chinese tech firm Kunlun bought Grindr, paying $152 million to fully own that app.
The Meet Group is based in Bucks Country, PA, but Growlr – which is based in Seattle and went live in 2010 – will keep its small staff in that city, reported technical.ly.
The Philadelphia Business Journal reported that The Meet Group has met with staggering success after integrating live streaming into its services, the first company outside of China to do so. The upgrade reportedly triggered the company's meteoric rise; The Philadelphia Business Journal noted that video brought the company no money at all in 2017, but that changed – to the tune of $82 million – in 2018.
Geoff Cook, the CEO of The Meet Group, explained that the addition of the gay male dating app was intended to reach a market that the company had not previously reached.
