JULY 2026
what we’re building, and why
by Justin McLeod, Founder & CEO of Overtone
At the end of last year, I shared that I was leaving Hinge to start a new company named Overtone. Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $18M with support from FirstMark Capital, Pace Capital, and Match Group, and that Esther Perel has joined our board alongside Spencer Rascoff and Diana Chapman. The details are in our press release. I want to share here a bit more about what we’re building, and why.
the problem of love
A lot of people close to me have been surprised that I would dive right back into starting a new company — especially another dating company. “Aren’t you tired? Or bored?” The truth is, the deeper I go into the problem of love, the more interesting and inspiring it becomes. Given our rising loneliness epidemic, it’s hard for me to imagine working on anything more meaningful or important.
And there has never been a more critical moment. The opportunities and perils of AI are staggering. I worry deeply about its misuse, especially around something as intimate and sacred as love. At the same time, if approached thoughtfully and ethically, I believe we now have the chance to create an entirely new and better paradigm in dating.
Think about the most un-human parts of the dating app experience: writing personal ads for ourselves, judging each other in a split second based on photos, sorting through thousands of potential partners, and wrangling them through the precarious funnel of like to match to chat to date. None of those steps exist because anyone wanted them. They exist because they were the best the technology could do. At Hinge, we spent years making each one as thoughtful and painless as possible. What’s different now is that we no longer have to make those steps better. We can eliminate them entirely.
modern matchmaking
Matchmaking has a rich tradition. For most of history, in most of the world, people met their partners through an introduction made by someone who knew them both. The networks were small, and the matchmaking varied in its wisdom. But we understood that finding a partner is one of life’s hardest and most consequential decisions, and we didn’t have to do it alone.
Over the last century, however, matchmaking fell into the fringes. Our networks expanded, and we took on our own searches for love, relying on our own personal opinions to guide us. Dating apps carried the trend to its logical end: networks of millions, filtered and sorted according to our tastes, all driven by instinctual flicks of our thumbs.
We gained a vastly expanded pool and the freedom to choose for ourselves. But we lost the guidance along the way. No wonder so many of us feel burned out: overwhelmed by options, with little help finding the ones truly worth pursuing.
Which is why I believe it’s time to bring back matchmaking. But this time with the reach and diversity of modern networks, the collective wisdom of relationship science, and the conviction that when it comes to options, all you need is less™.
what is overtone?
Overtone is not a dating app. By that I mean it’s not a social platform with profiles that reduce people to stats, quotes and photos. There are no opaque, algorithmic feeds trained on split-second impulses. And there’s no juggling likes, matches and chats across many people at once.
Overtone is a service.
We get to know each person deeply, learning about them in their own voice, hearing their own unique story. That’s where our name comes from. In music, overtones are the subtle frequencies that give a sound its richness. Two instruments can play the same note and sound completely different because of their overtones. The same goes with people. On paper, thousands might look like a good match for you. In reality, compatibility lives in the nuance.
And we make only the introductions that are worth making, grounded in relationship science and thoughtful reflection. We transparently explain why we believe someone is a great match. And we leave it up to our daters to meet in person and discover chemistry, with guidance along the way.
We know from research that instinct and attraction are impossible to fully predict, and we know that the magic of connection only happens in person. We simply believe in solving for what can be solved for, removing the noise, and letting you focus on finding that magic with people you’re most likely to be compatible with long-term.
The service will be available later this year in select locations. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this: who we choose to build a life with shapes our happiness more than almost anything else. That choice is too important to be left to chance, and too personal to be left to a swipe. We’re building Overtone to give it the care it deserves.
If you’d like to be there from the beginning, join the waitlist.
More soon.