Coffee Meets Bagel is a San Francisco-based online dating service. The dating and social networking company was created by three sisters; Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang. Coffee Meets Bagel was featured on the business reality series, Shark Tank in January 2015. As of 2022, Coffee Meets Bagel net worth is roughly around $150 million.
What is Coffeee Meets Bagel?
| Company Name | Coffee Meets Bagel |
| Founded | April 17, 2012 |
| Founders | Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang |
| Industry | Online Dating |
| Net Worth | $150 million |
Coffee Meets Bagel was launched by the Kang sisters, Dawoon, Arum, and Soo in 2012. The three sisters immigrated from Korea as teenagers. Coffee Meets Bagel was featured on the reality series, Shark Tank in 2015 after the Kang sisters applied to pitch their business in the show. The three North Korean sisters became infamous after they turned down $30 million from the billionaire, Mark Cuban.
Coffee Meets Bagel’s founders Dawoon, Arum, and Soo Kang received a top-notch education in the United States. Dawoon is a graduate of the Parsons School of Design. Likewise, Arum is a graduate of Stanford University and Soo completed her graduation from Harvard University.
How did Coffee Meet Bagel start?
The Kang sisters came up with the idea of developing an online dating app after they noticed the difficulties of meeting people online. Soon, they started working on their idea by searching for innovative ways to run a dating app that could provide a better match for the users. At that time, the three sisters were working somewhere else and had well-paying jobs. Despite that, they made a decision to quit their job.
The three siblings went to San Francisco, California so that they could get the required technical resources. After working for less than a year, the Coffee Meets Bagel app was fully developed. They also raised $600,000 from Lightbank and Match.com’s co-founder to launch their app in 2012. The online platform was developed based on Facebook users’ data by using a machine learning algorithm, which also makes it different from its competitors. The users are provided with potential matches within a short time every day.
The dating app surprisingly outnumbered other dating apps such as Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble. Along with that, the user base and revenue of the company grew expeditiously. Despite that, the startup company had a hard time with its cash flow and even lost a million dollars in a year. In 2015, the Kang sisters applied to pitch their business on the reality business show, Shark Tank. In the reality series, they put an offer of 5 percent in their company for an exchange of $500,000. At that time, the company was valued at around $10 million.
The billionaire Mark Cuban showed interest in their business even though the viewers thought the investment in the company is too risky. Cuban eventually made a proposal to Kang’s sisters to purchase the entire brand for a whopping $30 million. The proposal amount is considered the largest cash offer in the reality series. However, the Kang siblings were not satisfied with the proposal as they thought the offer was too low. Kang sisters were actually seeing the potential profit in their business by comparing with Match.com as it was earning $800 million a year.
The Coffee Meets Bagel reached out to other investors after their episodes in Shark Tank. They were able to collect more than $23.2 million in funding after going through five investment rounds. The online dating service’s main investors include DCM Ventures and Atami Capital. The online dating service company announced a $7.8 million Series A financing in February 2015 and raised $12 million in Series B funding in May 2018.
Coffee Meets Bagel personal data breach
In February 2019, the Coffee Meets Bagel’s site was attacked due to which more than 6.1 million users’ data was leaked. The company acknowledged that the names and email addresses of the users were stolen between late 2017 and mid-2018. Along with that, the other details of the users such as gender and age were affected and stolen by attackers.
Coffee Meets Bagel Net Worth
Coffee Meets Bagel has an estimated net worth of $150 million as of 2020. The online dating app gained some success during the COVID-19 pandemic after it changed up some fundamental features to cope with the new social climate. They added a video feature that allowed users to meet up through video calls. After appearing on Shark Tank, Coffee Meets Bagel has gained some moderate success.
