Helion, Kae love this dating app <em>TrulyMadly</em> enough to invest $5.6 million

Indian dating app TrulyMadly just announced its first round of funding. It raised US$5.6 million (INR 350 million) from Helion Venture Partners and Kae Capital.

Launched in August 2014, the app has a screening process for its users. To search for a date on TrulyMadly, you have to first submit copies of identity cards like passport, driving license, or PAN (Permanent Account Number) card. The TrulyMadly team will verify the ID proofs, social media profiles, and employment records to try and make sure that you are who you claim to be. If you make the cut, you will get a trust score based on how much real data you have submitted. Then the app will do the matchmaking. That will be based on the psychological profile it drew from likes and dislikes you confessed as well as what is evident from your social network persona. The higher the trust score, the more matches you will get. So girls and guys have an incentive to submit better and more ID proofs to raise their trust scores.

The app was founded by friends Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra, and Rahul Kumar, who already had solid startup experience behind them. Bhatia is the co-founder of travel major MakeMyTrip. Dhingra founded Letsbuy which was acquired by Flipkart. And Kumar was a product head at MakeMytrip with stints at Expedia and Oracle behind him. They wanted to disrupt the matrimonial market but decided that finding love, which could well lead up to marriage, was the more exciting problem to solve.

“For our app, “truly” stands for the verification factor and “madly” for the mad leap of faith everyone takes when they decide to chat up with someone online. If we were to provide a good mix of both, that would work well, we felt,” Bhatia tells Tech in Asia. The funding is a signal that online dating is finally finding mainstream acceptance in India, he says.

“When we saw the engagement metrics that the team has managed month on month, we were convinced they were on to something big and that we had to be part of this story,” Ritesh Banglani of Helion Venture Partners says.

Deep Kalra and Rajesh Magow, co-founders of MakeMyTrip, and Manish Vij, founder of digital media network Tyroo, had backed TrulyMadly early on as angel investors.

See: How the co-founder of MakeMyTrip fell TrulyMadly in love with a dating app