YORK COUNTY, Pa. — It was August 2022 when the bisexual dating app Bindr hit the matchmaking market.
CEO and Co-founder, Mary Richardson, says the app was developed after noticing a lack of queer representation on other dating platforms.
“We didn’t find anything that really worked for me and my co-founder as people under the bisexual umbrella, so there’s pansexual, there’s so many different things, we decided to just do away with the labels and make it much more fluid,” Richardson said.
After receiving funding through the Penn State LaunchBox program, Richardson and her co-founder developed the app, a statewide initiative to spur economic development, job creation, and student career success.
Less than two years later, the app has gone worldwide.
“We’re in every single country where it is legal to be LGBTIQ+ and we found a lot of people from outside the cities and now it’s starting to populate main cities as well,” Richardson said.
Richardson says the app broke its 100,000-user milestone earlier this year and averages about 1,000 new users daily.
The company expects to reach 1 million users by next summer.
“We want to keep pushing it. Even though we’ve had acquisition offers, we are just looking to keep it growing and be the next big leader for dating apps,” Richardson explained.
In 2023, Richardson won an award for Women in Technology from the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania and was nominated for Forbes 30 Under 30.
She hopes her success will serve as a model for other young entrepreneurs.
“Women get 2% of all venture capital funding and it’s even less if you’re a woman of color or queer," Richardson expressed. "The fact that we are doing so well with our funding and we’ve built a company that’s hard to say no to, I hope can inspire more women and people to do it.”
Richardson and her team are expected to attend several pride events in Washington D.C. and New York; she’s also set to graduate from PSU York this fall.
Richardson and her team are also expected to award students $15,000 students as part of the school's Summer Founder Program.
Currently, the app is only available on the iOS app store for iPhone and iPad, however, the company is looking to make the app more widely available.