Tinder beware, Wavoo is here to rock Indonesia’s dating industry

“There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” so the saying goes. And thanks to the rise of the internet era, that sea looks bigger than ever. The online dating industry in the US alone is now worth US$2.1 billion. Looking at Indonesia, however, there hasn’t been a single winner in the online dating industry. Wavoo wants to change that fact.

Launched on Halloween Day today, Wavoo is a dating app focused on the Indonesian market. It functions just like Tinder – swipe to the left if you’re not keen on the person, and swipe to the right if you’re interested. Matched couples can get to know each other by using the chatting feature.

It has a lot of other similarities with Tinder like Facebook login requirement and the ability to update your status. It also comes with two additional features.

The first feature is the “wink.” While the swipe feature lets you choose and reject people anonymously, you reveal who you are by sending winks to potential dates. The other new trick in Wavoo is its “Nearby” function which uses augmented reality tech on your camera (pictured below). With it, you can see other Wavoo users according to the proximity distance you set. The distance can go up to 100km.

See: This app brings traveling singles together, says it’s not for hooking up## Pivoting from “Indonesia’s Bang with Friends”

The two guys behind Wavoo are Yudhi Mandey and Gema Megantara. They have received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Mountain SEA Ventures to start dominating the online dating industry in Indonesia.

Before this, Mandey worked on Tristup, Indonesia’s version of “Bang with Friends”. He said that although they were able to garner over 500,000 registered users, the startup was too controversial for widespread adoption. They decided to shut it down and moved from the original web app to Wavoo, a smartphone app. “This is like a rebranding effort, or pivot,” says Mandey.

It took the duo just two months to develop the Wavoo app. In that timeline, the team went to universities and asked the students there to be beta testers so they could understand their target market. These 800 “handpicked” users then served as Wavoo’s early adopters, creating a database of potential romance for new users to peruse.

So what makes them think they can be Indonesia’s number one dating app? Mandey says: