Someone’s being taken out for a nice lunch. Mobile dating app startup Love Out Loud Asia will be launching its new app early next year
Mobile dating startup Love Out Loud Asia (LOLA) has today announced that it has been acquired by the Lunch Actually Group, a dating and matchmaking company that started in Singapore 10 years ago, for an undisclosed sum.
LOLA was founded in October 2013 by three entrepreneurs: Kenneth Lim, Wong Say Jon, and Chua Chun Kiat. It then went on to raise an undisclosed amount of funding from local startup incubator FatFish MediaLab via the i.Jam Reload scheme.
Today, LOLA has sent out more than 350,000 matches, and successfully paired more than 10,000 users across Southeast Asia with its ‘one match daily’ model.
Users on LOLA only receive one potential match a day which comes with a user-generated date idea. If both parties decide to click ‘like’ and get together, the app would have succeeded in pairing up users. However, if one or both do not click ‘like’, there is always tomorrow to try again.
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The reason behind Lunch Actually Group’s acquisition of LOLA is simple. As Violet Lim, CEO, Lunch Actually Group, said in an official statement, the multi-national company with a headcount of 65 is looking to innovate. The firm with predominantly offline operations is now seeing the potential of the online and mobile market, fuelled by the likes of Tinder.
Lunch Actually Group recently expanded into its fourth market, Indonesia. According to the same statement, the company has seen a 30 to 50 per cent group revenue growth per year since 2012.
“We are impressed by the LOLA founders’ ability, high standards as well as their perseverance to build and scale an effective dating app with limited resources and budget,” added Lim.
Going forward, LOLA will be launching a new app in Q1 2015 with added resources from the Lunch Actually Group. This app will be available on iOS and Android devices.
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