Tinder acquihires Humin to go beyond dating, and get an SF office too

Dating app Tinder is acquiring Humin the San Francisco startup which took a high-wire approach to contact management, trying to merge lots of disparate information into one contact app. Terms were undisclosed by TechCrunch understands from multiple sources that this roughly equates to an acqui-hire scenario.

Tinder says it is acquiring Humin’s technology and IP, while the founders and “many members” (says the company) of the team will switch over to effectively create Tinder’s office in SF.

Humin co-founders Ankur Jain and David Wyler join Tinder’s team as VP of Product and VP of Partnerships, respectively. It’s understood that Humin’s experience of contact management (and its location-based Knock Knock product) will be absorbed into Tinder’s drive to become a broader “meeting new people in real life” app, rather than simply a pure dating one, which is clearly what it’s best known for. The Humin product stored contacts based on when, where or how you met someone, with added search functionality. That kind of thinking could be useful for Tinder down the road.

Indeed, in a statement Sean Rad, co-founder and CEO of Tinder said the company would be leveraging Humin’s “experience and IP to accelerate our product roadmap.”

Jain said he has met Rad at F.ounders in Dublin and “it became abundantly clear that we were both fighting for the same thing.” In other words to connect people in the real world.

However, multiple sources have confirmed to us that Humin had limited traction in the crowded contact management space and was struggling to raise further capital. Not all the Humin team are moving over to get a Tinder desk

TechCrunch understands that the company was down as shopping for an acquisition back in December and in the process has lost a handful of key staff such as Arielle Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s youngest Sister, who has joined Kleiner Perkins.

The acquisition is in line with early reports, such as on ReCode, that Tinder itself was struggling to bring on more experienced people and clearly needed a footprint in San Francisco.

Is this your average face-saving exit for a startup that struggled to raise more money; a genuine acquisition of useful IP/engineering experience; a simple way to fully staff a new SF office; or a way to bring on new executives to a company that could really use them right now? We’re going for a little bit of all those things.