This generation of twenty-somethings has grown so fed up with swipe-based dating apps that they're willing to try just about anything else—even an AI matchmaker. After leaving UC Berkeley, Ditto co-founders Allen Wang and Eric Liu set out to create a way for their peers to connect without spending hours each week wading through the chaos of apps like Tinder and Hinge. "We see that people are getting super tired of all the endless swiping and endless small talk, and they're really looking for something more genuine in real life."

Instead of a conventional app, college students can join Ditto by texting a specific iMessage number along with a code. From there, an AI chatbot introduces itself as Ditto, "a dating initiative built by college students who get it… no swiping, no awkward DMs, just real dates every Wednesday at 7 pm."

Users navigate an onboarding process through text, starting with basic details like their name, gender, and birth date. Then, Ditto moves into more in-depth questions to get a sense of someone's personality, interests, and dating preferences. Some users even upload photos of their celebrity crushes to give the AI a clearer picture of their type. The Ditto algorithm doesn't match people based on shared hobbies and interests, but rather on what those hobbies and interests reveal about who they are. "If there's this guy, and he's really into rock climbing, skydiving, and outdoor sports, and this girl, if she's into hip hop, streetwear, and skateboarding, then even though those hobbies don't look similar on the surface, I can tell you deeper down, both are very adventurous; maybe they're very individualistic," Wang said. "So that's actually the core reason why people will find chemistry with each other, and so basically our claim is that chemistry is actually predictable with the right signals."

Then, every Wednesday at 7 PM, Ditto messages users with their match for the week. "It comes with the person, it comes with a time, it comes with a location, and the users simply just need to show up and date each other and come back. We'll collect more feedback about the date, and then improve our understanding of the user, and send them to a better next date," Wang said. "Right now people's goal is really just to go out there and meet each other, so it's actually removing a lot of friction for our users, so that we are doing the heavy lifting for them, and they just simply go there and then meet whoever."

Ditto has 150,000 signups, and Wang says that out of all the matches connected through Ditto, about 20% end up going on a date. (If that percentage seems low to you, then you've probably never used Tinder.)

Ditto creates a collage-style graphic to introduce users to one another and explain why they might be a good match—a popular aesthetic among Gen Z that other connection apps with young founders, like Sonder, have also embraced. With any dating app, and especially one that minimizes the time between matching and meeting up, it can be tough to gauge the safety of a situation—is the person you're meeting really who they claim to be? For now, while Ditto is only available at a few dozen colleges, there's a built-in vetting process since you know someone is a student at your university with a .edu email. Ditto is focused on figuring out how to expand to more schools—and eventually beyond college—while scaling safely. Even for the most established and well-funded dating apps, this is a tough challenge. But Ditto does have $9.2 million in seed funding from investors like Gradient, Peak XV, and Scribble. "99% of the investors just reached out to us through inbound, because we were pretty big on LinkedIn and Twitter for a bit," Wang said. "Even Duolingo's co-founder Severin [Hacker] reached out to me saying, 'Hey, love your mission, I really like what you do, let's hop on a call.'"

Ditto has built this reputation through its irreverent marketing, like videos of robot stunts. Now based in San Francisco, Ditto has twelve full-time employees, but they're also hiring a "Chief Yacht Officer" to throw promotional parties (yes, this is a legitimate job listing). "Our users are college students, and they can smell corporate marketing from a mile away," Wang said. "But the stunts are the top of the funnel, not the product…Viral moments get college kids to look; a good first date is what makes them stay."