Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across eight major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. Read our round-up of NYC’s rising startups from last quarter here.
* * *
During the height of the pandemic, Mia Lux and her husband of four years decided to go through a divorce. She reentered the dating scene by downloading dating apps but said she was “horrified” by the way people treated each other.
There was ghosting, verbal abuse and terrible in-person experiences. Overall, she found the apps felt more like an e-commerce site than a place where people could develop meaningful relationships.
“It felt really dehumanizing being in this pool of people where you feel like you’re a product, like you’re just something that’s been offered up to people for sale, and we’re just swiping through each other,” Lux said.
Lux shared her experience with her life coach Lauren Zander, who taught Lux a lot about love and meaningful relationships. This led Lux to ask Zander to work with her to develop a dating app built on Zander’s decades of work as a life coach.
“There’s a lot of work on what makes healthy relationships and how people fall in love,” Lux said. “It’s not like people don’t know. It’s just that this is not how dating apps have been built. They are built far more like a social media model where it’s more about addictive, dopamine-spiking behaviors and less about connecting people deeply.”
Last year, Lux and Zander started building La Vette Social Club, which Lux said is a “radically different” online dating platform where verified singles interact with each other through video sessions focused on wellness and self-growth, among other topics. The platform launched last month after a beta phase with 200 users.
La Vette users must agree to undergo a background check, which eliminates catfishers and scammers, Lux said. The platform also verifies users through video profiles, which allow users to get a better sense of another user’s personality and have more free-flowing conversations.
During La Vette’s beta phase, the co-founders realized that women tended to be more selective and scrutinizing when looking at photos of men, but they started to open up to the possibility of a man when watching a video of him.
“I just think the more data you give people, the better,” Lux said. “Otherwise you’ve asked them to make a selection based on [facial] symmetry, which is so stupid for a relationship because the defining things that make a relationship last are kindness and self-awareness — things you can’t see in a picture but you can get a little bit more of a sense of from video.”
Lux knows that video can seem daunting to some people, but she hopes those people will feel some comfort in knowing that everyone else is in the same boat and is also opening themselves up to the more vulnerable world of video.
La Vette users can meet each other by browsing the member gallery or chatting on the group forum. The startup really differentiates itself from other dating websites with its virtual social spaces, where people can participate in instructor-led workshops and socialize with other users. Lux said the virtual social spaces reduce some of the pressure of online dating by allowing people to meet in a natural setting before jumping into a one-on-one conversation.
“We used to meet and date in a social context — friends of friends, colleagues. It was in your village. That way, you know you were in a socialized space. The pressure was off; you could get to know each other and you also felt safe because the person you’re meeting knew someone you knew in this kind of vetted, values-aligned community,” Lux said. “I think the future of dating is going in that direction.”
The La Vette platform has six settings where people can meet. There is a general social lounge with mingling, trivia nights and entertainment, but there are also areas devoted to wellness, mental health and self-improvement workshops. One of the lounges, called the Playroom, can includes programming around anything from sexuality to creative expression.
“We’ve been as mindful as we can about having the system work in a way that rewards people for actually putting in effort and showing up, versus, you know, trying to get them to consume profiles,” Lux said.
If a user is in an event space and someone shares something that catches their interest, they can either message that person or invite them into a virtual video chat with a two-minute timer.
When a user receives a message, they can either choose to accept or decline the message. Once the conversation is underway, La Vette encourages the two users to schedule a virtual video date. The video dates, known as “virtual vibe checks,” are guided by automatically-generated conversation prompts, which solves the dilemma of what to talk about.
At the end of the video chat, the platform will ask both parties if they would like to be more than friends, just friends or if they are not interested in talking to the other person again. This way, users will know where they stand with the other person instead of barking up the wrong tree.
“We tried to design it in a way that respects people’s time but also doesn’t require anything hard for them,” Lux said, adding that users don’t have to provide an explanation for their decision.
La Vette has raised $2 million in seed funding from investors like Questlove and Hugh Jackman, who learned about the company through Zander. The newly launched platform is currently seeking new members as it works to build a critical mass of users.
