Match Group

Match Group runs the dating-app business that many people meet through Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid and the rest of its portfolio. By our assessment, its real strength is scale: it owns the apps that define modern online dating for a lot of users, from fast swiping to more profile-led matching. The trade-off is that this is a crowded, highly mediated market, and the company’s products can feel more like variations on the same basic system than like separate worlds. In practice, Match Group is less about romance as an idea than about the mechanics of finding, filtering and messaging people. It sits at the center of app-based dating rather than on the edges of it. The Astrina catalogue marks it as a US company, and the whole business reads like that kind of platform logic.