Lonely on Valentine’s Day? These 5 Indian apps want to help you find your love

It’s that time of the year again when the universe seems bent on reminding all the singles in the world that there’s a huge gaping hole in their lives. The Valentine’s Day frenzy on television, billboards, and malls in India will surely drive many an aching heart to take desperate measures.

Before you do anything drastic, you might want to try out these 5 Indian apps that promise to help you find love.

1. Thrill

This app gives women the upper hand in finding love. It lets women connect with whoever they please. But a man has to apply to join, and the user-base of women can either approve or reject his profile. The approved men get stamped as “Thrilling”, and they can start connecting. The app requires third-party login via Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter as some sort of vague attempt at ensuring real IDs. Thrill also allows women to request an audio verification, without providing their own phone numbers, or a video verification call from men, for which women can keep their own cameras turned off.

Thrill was founded by Josh Israel and Devin Serago, who moved to New Delhi from the United States. Available on both Android and iOS, the app closed a seed round of funding from one of India’s top matrimonial sites Shaadi.com and a few serial entrepreneurs.

See: Indian dating app Thrill: “Women are in control, men gotta make the grade”

2. Elop

In case you’re wondering, the name “Elop” stands for “Express Love App.” This app, built by a bunch of entrepreneurs from the southern Indian state of Kerala, started as a college project. “During college years, crushes were the most interesting thing. While there were apps for dating, there was nothing that helped us express affection to those we already knew. So we decided to do an app for crushes,” explains Akash Mathew, founder and CEO of Cied Technologies, which built Elop.

This app lets you pick crushes from Facebook, and if someone from your list picks you as a secret crush, you get a match. Both of you will be notified that you are in love. “We shared the app with our friends and cousins first and it spread like wildfire, and soon was in the list of top 10 social apps in India,” Mathew recalls. When Elop crossed 35,000 users from 130 countries last year, it raised INR 7 million (US$113,000) in seed funding.

After Mathew finished college, he shifted the focus of Elop. The app was redesigned to let users express love to all their special ones, including friends, family, and crushes. Users can log into the app, create a list of special ones from Facebook, and send them beautiful songs.

3. Qupid