Dating app Cerca will show how Gen Z actually dates at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

It’s a universally acknowledged fact that the current dating scene sucks, no matter what city you live in. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a complaint.

Take Miles Slayton, who completed a banking internship in New York City and saw how he and his friends struggled to find interesting people in the city’s tough dating scene. “We are using our phones more than ever,” he told TechCrunch. “I thought to myself: Why are dating apps so terrible?”

He opined that the problem shouldn’t be with dating apps per se, but rather with the way the product works these days. He said many popular dating apps were designed with millennials in mind, but his generation, Generation Z, operates very differently. It’s a return to what dating was like in the past: People of this generation meet “through hookups, through people in our social circles,” he said.

He collaborated with friends Willy Konzelman and Carter Monk and was released just a few months ago aboutA Dating app that matches people With others already in their social circles. The company announced a $1.6 million seed round this summer and has already got people interested: The app has about 60,000 users, most of whom are now in New York and spread out on college campuses.

The company is part of The emerging battlefield I will demonstrate the technology in TechCrunch disabled 2025 Later this month in San Francisco.

There’s a reason Gen Z is falling back on old ways of dating, and that’s because of the internet and the Covid pandemic, said Slayton, the company’s CEO. “We simply don’t trust strangers,” he said, adding that people are too afraid of rejection.

Cerca’s product attempts to address this. Users create a standard dating profile, sync their contacts, and from there, only friends or friends of friends who are already on the app are shown as potential matches. “The fear of strangers has been eliminated,” Slayton said. All likes are anonymous, eliminating the fear of rejection. He said users get four swipes a day, hoping to eliminate batting fatigue and focus more on match selection.

“There’s no world where you have to view 100 profiles in one minute,” he said. “You really have to take a second to think about each profile. These are real people.”

Profiles first reveal mutual friends, then background, then photos. “It’s not just about our appearance,” he said. The user receives a notification that someone has liked their profile, although they will not know who. Cerca’s algorithm will boost the liker’s profile in the feed of the person they’re interested in, who can then decide whether or not to like them again.

Every evening, the matches are revealed, and no one knows who made the first move.

Having mutual friends makes it easy to check safety, as people can simply send text messages to their mutual friends to collect information about who they are going on a date with. Users can also decide which and how many contacts they want to share with Cerca, as well as block certain people from seeing their profiles. “You can also filter for words like dentist, doctor,” he said. “No screenshot or screen recording. Safety is of the utmost importance to us.”

Aside from the online world, the company also creates merchandise and hosts events.

Sloton said he and his co-founders decided to apply to Startup Battlefield and knew a founder who was participating in the event. “I think it’s a great opportunity for the United States and the world to see who we are and to represent dating in a positive light,” he said.

If you want to learn from Cerca first-hand, see dozens of additional offerings, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Head here to learn more about this year’s Disruptheld from October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.