After conquering Japan, Facebook dating service Pairs sets its sights on the rest of Asia

Tokyo-based startup Eureka announced today that its Facebook-connected dating service Pairs has acquired more than one million registered users in Japan and Taiwan. The user milestone comes just over a year and a half after Pairs’ initial launch in Japan in October 2012, with more than 740,000 coming from the domestic market. The service has attracted more than 300,000 Taiwanese users since debuting in February.

Hoping to replicate its success in new markets, Pairs is gearing up for major expansion across Asia. The service hopes to add eight additional countries and obtain 10 million users by the end of 2016.

“Approximately 25 percent of Pairs Taiwan users are actually from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, so we will be strengthening our presence in those areas to become number one in the Taiwan market by the end of the year,” Takeru Kawashita, Pairs’ global marketing director, tells Tech in Asia. Users from outside of Taiwan are already joining Pairs without us investing in marketing or ads.”

Kawashita said that the service will head to South Korea next, with launch tentatively scheduled for December.

“It will depend on how fast we can spread Pairs in Taiwan,” he says. “If we become number one in Taiwan before then, we will likely enter South Korea even sooner.”

Pairs requires people to sign up with their Facebook accounts, and only users with their relationship status set to “single” can join. New signups are also subjected to an age verification process. Asian users tend to be more wary of safety concerns when it comes to meeting people online, so the service is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by an outsourced web security vendor.

Since launch, Pairs has made more than three million matches. Users have sent nearly 30 million messages through the service, and the Pairs global Facebook page has just under eight million likes. The service wants to replicate the success of online dating in the US – a US$2 billion industry in 2013 – but customized for the regional demographic. According to a statement from Pairy:

Japan is facing declining birthrates and aging population, and it is a social problem for the percentage of unmarried people to increase just because they think ‘there’s no opportunity to meet new people’ or ‘there’s no compatible partner out there.’ To solve this, Pairs will devote itself to spreading the concept of online dating, a much easier way to find and meet a compatible partner. By accelerating expansion in Asia, a region which Western online dating services have not yet been able to penetrate, Pairs will establish a new online dating industry that will fit Asian culture.

Pairs, which is entirely self-funded, is not seeking VC support or investments toward its expansion. Kawashita explains that the service, which charges a monthly fee to male users, is already profitable. A basic monthly membership for male users costs about JPY3000 (US$29) per month in Japan and NT$790 (US$26). Pairs is available for iOS and Android.

See: Flirty Chinese chat app Momo passes 100 million registered users
Online dating is a crowded field, but Pairs seems to be the strongest Facebook-based option in Japan. My-Qpit, a service that connects people on Facebook if a match is made in the app, has less than 1,000 monthly users. Omiai, another Japanese dating app linked to Facebook, has about 1.6 million Facebook likes. Both, like Pairs, are free for women but require men to pay a monthly fee.