Tinder’s Sean Rad will soon step down from his role as chief executive to become chairman of Swipe Ventures, an accelerator and acquisition vehicle owned by the dating app’s Dallas-based parent company, Match Group.
Greg Blatt, Tinder’s chairman, will become chief executive and continue to serve as chairman and CEO of Match. He will operate out of Los Angeles.
“My new role allows me to continue to contribute meaningfully to the overall strategy of Tinder, while expanding Tinder’s footprint through Swipe Ventures,” Rad said in a statement. “There is so much untapped opportunity in our space.”
No stranger to working within an accelerator, Rad co-founded Tinder in 2012 inside Hatch Labs, a now-defunct incubator run by New York’s IAC. IAC, headed by Barry Diller, spun off Match in an initial public offering last year.
The move marks the second time Rad has moved away from chief executive duties at Tinder. He first stepped down in 2014 in the wake of a sexual harassment and discrimination suit filed against the West Hollywood dating app by Whitney Wolfe, a co-founder and former vice president of marketing, who detailed allegations against both Rad and co-founder Justin Mateen, former chief marketing officer. The parties settled the lawsuit in September 2014 without an admission of wrongdoing.
Rad was replaced at the time by Chris Payne, a former vice president at eBay Inc. and Microsoft Corp.; he returned to his former role after just five months.
Since then, Tinder has grown to a reported 50 million monthly active users and launched paid features including Passport, which allows users to view profiles in other geographic areas, and Rewind, which lets people reconsider their previous rejections. In March, the company purchased contact management app Humin, a move that is expected to facilitate Tinder’s entry into the roughly $80 billion U.S. job recruitment industry.
While Match does not break out Tinder’s revenue in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the company reported fourth-quarter revenue of more than $316 million for the period ended Sept. 30 – an increase of 18 percent compared with the same period last year.
“Revenue during the period was favo-rably impacted by a strong contribution from Tinder,” as well as other divis-ions, the company said in the earnings report.
