As an investment company with a strong interest in the emerging markets in Africa, we continue to play our part in searching for opportunities to invest in and support startups that have a measurable impact on the lives and livelihoods of those living on the African continent. In the last 3 years, we have invested in startups in proptech, fintech, transportation, and health. And in 2022, our goal was to venture into unexplored territories and invest in startups in other industries.
We first met the the founders of Trueflutter, Dare Olatoye and Ayo Olatoye, back in 2019. It was our first meeting with a company tackling love in Africa (starting in Nigeria). Well, now, I’m old school: I like to meet guys in person. I would probably never be on a dating app if not for covid and I’m still not really on them. So Dare and Ayo had a lot of convincing to do lol. And they did. I came away from that first conversation with them really impressed with what they are building. However, we passed on investing at that time as we were concerned with their burn and ability to raise more funding. We were wrong.
Fast forward 2 years and a TrueFlutter deck came across my desk again. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they had successfully closed that round we passed on and had gained considerably more revenue traction. Then in early in 2022, our team met with Dare and the team in Lagos for the first time. In that meeting, they gave us a breakdown of how Nigeria’s teeming youth population are in search of genuine connections. They further explained to us how most single Nigerians have to rely on western dating apps to find partners. The founders themselves had used these dating apps and shared how frustrating and exhausting their experience was. This was not necessarily because those apps were not good but because the apps weren’t configured to incorporate the unique cultural context and socioeconomic peculiarities of a country like Nigeria. Although they complained, lol, they decided to do something about the problem. And thus, TrueFlutter was born.
The Dating App sphere in Nigeria is not exactly at ground zero. Many Nigerian dating apps have been developed but there has not been any measurable impact so far. Many of the subscribers of these dating apps fall into the hands of scammers and kidnappers. And as word-of-mouth spreads, people eventually desist from using these apps and from inputting their private information, and such apps die a natural death or morph into some dark-web pseudo-porn tool. TrueFlutter, being well aware of these problems, created solution with features to address these pain points and give singles a far more superior experience.
In Q2 2022, our team began to carry out our due diligence on TrueFlutter. We scrutinized the app’s features (security, billings, design, etc.) and we concluded that Dare and Ayo were really on to something. We saw how they carefully addressed the problems faced in that space particularly security and the assessment of how real or fake a user is. The traction in monthly active users went from 0 to more than 50,000 subscribers between January to December 2021. Their user base expanded beyond Nigeria with connections happening now in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. Users has given positive reviews of the app. And most importantly, the company is converting users to paid customers.
In August 2022, we were glad to make an investment in TrueFlutter. We believe that this dating solution will be used by millions of Nigerians and Africans as long as they allow their purpose to guide them every step of the way. We are glad to be investing in an enterprise that is positively impacting social relationships in real-time. Go TrueFlutter!