Technology

Tinder will now help you find matches with those people you may cross paths with in your day-to-day life. As promised earlier, the company today is announcing the launch of a new location-based feature that will narrow your list of potential dating prospects to those who hit up your same bar for after-work drinks, or who stop by your favorite coffee shop for their daily caffeine fix, or who work out at your same gym.

Yes, thatright — you no longer have to say &hello& in real life — you can match first, then speak.

This is what itcome to, friends. Even the &meet cute& story is now a dating app product.

The feature, known as Tinder Places, was previously spotted during beta tests.

Starting today, Tinder Places is formally being announced as a public beta test thatunderway in three cities:Sydney and Brisbane, Australia and Santiago, Chile. (It was being tested privately in these markets prior to now.) The plan is to collect user feedback from the public trials, and tweak the product before it launches to all users worldwide, the company says.

The idea of sharing your location with strangers, however,is a bit creepy— especially considering that Tinder users are not always respectful. But Tinder believes that the fact itshowing you people you might actually run into in real life will actually prompt more civility in those initial chats.

&I do think that — and this is a personal hypothesis of mine — if you match with someone who you know goes to the same place as you, I think that will set a very different tone to the conversation than someone who is more or less anonymous as an online match on a dating platform,& says Samantha Stevens, director of Location Products at Tinder, who led the productdevelopment.

She says the larger idea here is to present users with potential matches who you already have things in common with, as reflected by the places you go.

&The places that you go say a lot about who you are as an individual, what you value, your hobbies, your interests,& she continues. &So being able to match with someone on Tinder who shares those same things with you, we believe creates a more genuine match and a better conversation.&

That said, not everyone would want strangers on a dating service to know where to find them.

But Stevens explains Places has a number of safeguards built-in to make users feel more comfortable, and to limit the featureability to be used for stalking.

&As a female who designed this feature, I personally made sure that I would feel safe using it,& she says.

For starters, the feature is opt in, not opt out.

It leverages Mapbox andFoursquarePilgrim SDK to identify and categorize places you go, and it only shares those places Foursquare deems &social.& (Foursquare is able to &wake up& Tinderapp for background location, in case you&re wondering how this works). Tinder says it will not record places like your house, the office building where you work, banks, doctors& offices and other venues that are either too personal or not relevant to matching. All this appears in a separate section of the Tinder appinterface.

Plus, your place visits aren&t recorded to the app in real-time. Instead, Tinder waits until at least 30 minutes before a place shows up, or even longer. It randomizes the time before someone appears associated with a particular venue in order to limit others& abilities to deduce peopleroutines.

In addition, users who are participating in Places will get an alert when a new place is added, and can then choose to toggle that place off so itnot shown right away.

You also can tell Tinder to never show a particular place again after its first appearance. So, for example, if you never want to meet people at your gym when you&re all hot and sweaty, you can disable that place from ever appearing.

Your association with a place also deletes from the app after 28 days, not only as a privacy protection, but also because it helps keep data fresh, Stevens says. (After all, just because you went to that hip bar a year ago does not make you a person who goes to hip bars.)

Of course, a dedicated stalker could make a note of your favorite haunts and attempt to locate you in the real world, but this would require extra effort in terms of writing things down, and trying to determine your patterns. It wouldn&t be impossible to start making some connections, but it would require dedication to the task at hand.

Despite the safeguards, itunclear that the real-world benefit to users is significant enough to opt in to this additional data collection. While there are arguably use cases for matching with those you cross paths with, simply visiting the same coffee shop isn&t necessarily an indicator of a potential for a relationship. That comes down to a lot of other factors — including, most importantly, that unpredictable chemistry — something neither Tinder, nor any other dating app, can determine — and a set of shared values. At best, this &place data& is an icebreaker.

But for Tinder, location data on its users holds far more value.

The company has no plans to delete its own records of your jaunts around town. You can&t push a button to clear your data, for instance. If you want it gone, you&ll need to delete your Tinder user account entirely, we understand.

The company says users haven&t asked for this sort of functionality during tests. Rather, they&ve opted in to the feature in full force, with very few qualms about their personal data or its usage, it seems.

&In terms of opt-in rates — and we&ll see how this behaves as we go to a bigger population — but we&re at like 99 percent,& says Tinder CEO Elie Seidman, who moved over from Match GroupsOKCupidtop position to lead Tinder in January. &I don&t know that we&ll see that hold up on a broad population, but I think we could expect this is a 90-plus percent opt-in rate.&

That seems to contradict the shift in user sentiment around personal data collection in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, which has led the worldlargest social network to rethink its practices, and potentially face regulation. The fallout has led to users becoming more cynical and wary of social apps asking them to share their data — and in the case of Tinder, where itabout — well, frankly, romance and sex — one would think users would give &opting in& a bit more thought.

Seidman doesn&t believe theremuch for users to be concerned about, though. Thatbecause Tindermain business isn&t ads — itsubscriptions to its premium service, he explains.

&We&re not using [personal data] to sell advertising,& the exec says. &If you think about the trade between our members and us — like, what do you get in exchange for the data In one place, you get photos of kids, right And obviously, a lot of ads. And in the other place, you get connected to the most important part of your life. So I think ita very different thing,& Seidman says.

Thatcertainly a starry-eyed way of viewing Tinderpotential, of course.

One could argue that &photos of kids& — meaning your family, your friends and their family, and generally, those broader connections you have through social networks — are at least equally important to your romantic relationships, if not more valuable. (Especially if you&re just using Tinder for hook-ups).

Tinder claims that itnot using the location data to target users with its in-app ads, but that doesn&t mean the option is off the table forever. Having a massive trove of location data on users could be an advantage there, as well as a way to improve its algorithm, and even potentially to help it expand into real-world events — something Stevens didn&t rule out, saying if that was something a large number of users demanded, Tinder may consider it.

Meanwhile, a better matching algorithm would be a significant competitive advantage for Tinder, which is today fending off other newcomers, too, not just the desktop web-era dating sites. It&sembroiled in back-and-forth lawsuits with top rival Bumble, for example, and even itself is adopting Bumble&women speak first& feature.Given that the industry at large has stolen the swipe to match mechanism Tinder popularized, that seems fair enough.

The new location feature won&t be as easily copied, Seidman believes.

&This is the first time, on an experience before people match, where we&ve changed — in a really fundamental way — the user interface. Of course, it feels very much like Tinder,& he says. &Therea large body of work here and the team has worked for quarters to do this. Ita product that inherently works better with scale. We&re drawing a smaller circle around the universe,& Seidman adds. &You need Tinderlevel of scale to make this work.&

Tinder officially claims &tens of millions& of users worldwide, with estimates putting that figure at more than 50 million.

The company hasn&t provided a time-table as to when location-based dating will roll out worldwide.

Photo credits: illustration: Bryce Durbin; screenshots: Tinder;couple: Philip Lee Harvey/Getty Images

Betaworks is hosting TechCrunch&sInclude Office Hoursfor the month of May. For the first time ever, Include Office Hours will be bi-coastal — held in San Francisco and New York on the same day at 2pm local time at each location. On Tuesday, May 29th, partners Peter Rojas and Matt Hartman will be meeting with startup founders in SF and NYC, respectively. Founders can apply here.

TechCrunch started theInclude program in 2014 with theaim of utilizing its networks to open opportunities for underrepresented and underserved founders in tech. One of the principal elements of this program is the Include Office Hours program. Throughout the year, TechCrunch joins with partners at various VC firms to connect with founders in private 20-minute meetings. Founders will get critical feedback and advice on various aspects of their business.

Founders from various backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Underrepresented and underserved founders include, but are not limited to, veteran, female, Latino/a, Black, LGBTQ and handicapable founders.

The May Include Office Hours will be hosted by betaworks on May 29th from 2-4pm local time in each city. Betaworks is a startup studio and venture capital fund focusing on building and investing in engineering and design driven consumer technology products. Apply here.

Meet the participating partners:

Matt Hartman, Partner

Matt Hartman is a partner at betaworks ventures. Prior to joining betaworks, Matt built ReferBoost (licensed to Apartments.com), and was at Hot Potato (acquired by Facebook). He began his career building the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company (acquired by CBRE) and is the inventor of Patent #8189781 related to the protection of digital images.

Matt studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Peter Rojas, Partner

Peter Rojas is a founding partner at betaworks ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund based in New York and San Francisco. He also co-founded several startups, including Weblogs Inc. (acquired by AOL in 2005), where he created and was editor-in-chief of both Engadget and Joystiq; Gizmodo (formerly Gawker Media, now part of Univision); music discovery service RCRD LBL; and gdgt, a social commerce platform (acquired by AOL in 2013). Prior to betaworks ventures he worked at AOL as VP of Strategy and later as co-director of Alpha, the companyexperimental products group.

If you are partner/managing director of a firm and are interested in hosting an Include Office Hour, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Uber CEO is in Paris this week meeting with the French president to talk tech in Europe andexpanding its insurance coverage in the region, but back in the U.S. the company is moving ahead on another kind of expansion.

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Uber is raising another secondary round of funding of up to $600 million, on a valuation of $62 billion. The fundraising development comes at the same time that Uber is also releasing its Q1 financials — which indicate that the company pulled in $2.5 billion in net revenues, with a net loss of $601 million, and negative EBIDTA of $304 million on a pro forma basis.

Raising between $400 million and $600 million on a valuation of $62 billion (at $40 per share) would indicate that while Uber is recovering from the drop in valuation from its last round with SoftBank at the end of 2017—another round with secondary components that valued the company at $48 billion — itstill not back up (or higher than) its loftiest valuation of $69 billion.

From what we understand, investors participating in the offering, which has yet to close, include Coatue, Altimeter and TPG. Uber employees with at least 1,000 shares can also participate in the financing. According to the terms of offer, no one can sell more than $10 million worth of shares.

That general upward trend is also being reflected in Uberfinancials.

An investor presentation that was shared with TechCrunch indicated that the company$2.5 billion in net revenues was aseven percent quarter over quarter increase, and a 67 percent increase year over year. Uber$304 million losses, meanwhile, were about half the amount they were last year: in Q1 2017, Uberadjusted losses were $597 million. Gross bookings — the total taken for all of Ubertransportation services — was $11.3 billion in Q1, a 55 percent increase compared to $7.5 billion a year ago. At the end of Q1, Uber had $6.3 billion in gross cash.

GAAP numbers indicated net revenues of $2.6 billion with a GAAP profit nearly as big: $2.456 billion. &We had $3 billion of income on a GAAP basis because of the ‘gain& from the Yandex and Grab deals,& a spokesperson said. &Thatwhy we prefer to focus on EBITDA as the best number to show our underlying business in the quarter.&

&We are off to a terrific start in 2018, with our rides business beating internal plan and continuing to grow at healthy rates, while we significantly reduce our losses and maintain our leadership position around the world,& Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. &Given the size of the opportunity ahead of us and our goal of making Uber a true mobility platform, we plan to reinvest any over-performance even more aggressively this year, both in our core business as well as in big bets like Uber Eats globally.&

In other words, that could mean losses might get worse in the short-term as Uber continues to invest money in businesses like Eats and JUMP, the bike-share service it acquired for about $200 million earlier this yearto expand them into more markets. As with many tech companies, Uber appears to be focused more on growth than profitability, even as it eyes up an IPO, possibly as soon as next year.

Uber has raised over $21 billion in funding to date.