Since then, the battle lines have been firmly drawn. “Their offer didn’t excite me at all.” Battle lines At the time, he was attracting millions of dollars in Series A investments, the early financing that can help a startup generate buzz. “I struggled to see how they would benefit us,” Younas said. Muzz founder Younas turned down Match Group’s purchase offer as it didn’t excite him When Younas refused, he said that Match returned with higher offers and a final one of $35m. In 2017, Muzmatch got accepted into startup accelerator Y Combinator, where it raised $1.75m in seed funding.Ī year later, Match got in touch again, this time with an offer to buy Muzmatch for $15m, Younas said. Ultimately, Younas said, he failed to get his company’s name trademarked in the EU on Match’s objections but registered it instead in the UK. Younas added that he did, however, remove the heart logo at Match’s request. He argued that “match” was a common word, one chosen to evoke traditions of matchmaking. It argued that the branding – along with a name that included the word “match” – would create confusion, leading users to believe Muzmatch was a Match property.īut Younas refused to remove the word “match” from his trademark. In 2016, Match Group lawyers contacted him, asking him to withdraw the trademark for the name. A year later, Younas registered the trademark for the name “Muzmatch” in the United States and applied for one in the European Union. The app, like the site, included a red heart logo. “Muslims don’t date, they marry,” he likes to say, and that was the opportunity he was offering.Īs users in the early 2010s moved increasingly to mobile platforms over websites, Younas quit his Morgan Stanley job in 2014 to spend six months building an app version of his site. Younas started the website as a forum where single Muslims hoping to get married could connect. Younas, meanwhile, declined to share Muzz’s annual revenues but said the business is profitable and has close to 9 million users. In 2022, Match Group reported a net profit of $360m on revenues of $3.18bn. The global dating market was valued at $8.9bn in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 6.9 percent from 2022 to 2030, according to the consulting firm Grand View Research. We’ve wasted all this money on legal fees that could’ve gone on something better.”Īt stake are millions of dollars in profits. “It’s exhausted me and cost us nearly $2 million, which for is small change, but it affects us and is a meaningful amount of money for us. “It’s been a huge time sink,” Younas told Al Jazeera. This was not a scenario that Younas anticipated when he started his website from his London apartment in 2011 while working full time at Morgan Stanley. His website, originally named Muzmatch, was forced to drop the word “match” and rebrand as simply Muzz. The latest blow came in late April when Younas lost a trademark appeal in the United Kingdom. Younas, 38, a British investment banker turned entrepreneur, has been butting heads since 2016 with the online dating giant Match Group, which owns, Tinder and OkCupid, among other brands.Īt issue are elements of his website’s branding – elements that Match has argued create confusion between its platforms and Younas’s. Instead, his biggest hurdle has been figuring out how to fend off a competitor that is suing him in multiple countries on multiple fronts with the aim, he said, of “stifling competition”. More than a decade ago, when Shahzad Younas started a website specifically for Muslims to meet and marry, he thought his problems would be the typical kind – attracting users, expanding the business, earning a profit.
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