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Social Networking - Thursday, June 12, 2008

Facebook Dating Startup Zoosk Raises $4.1M

San Francisco-based dating site Zoosk has raised $4.1M led by Canaan Partners with ATA Ventures. The company has developed a simple dating interface for people to get to know each other on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. It's all straightforward - the main challenge seems to be how to cut down on spam and abuse.

Zoosk has some nice stats:
+ Founded in 2007, the startup has more than 400K daily unique visitors
+ More than 1M messages per day are exchanged through Zoosk
+3M dating profiles on the network with a growth rate 5-7% per week.

Zoosk faces a head wind of competitors. Match.com has hooked up with Facebook on a app called Little Black Book. “Are YOU Interested” is another top rival. While Zoosk and Are YOU Interested came out like gang busters, both applications have plateaued, with little growth over the last several months. It's unclear to us why that is.

Zoosk is led by CEO and founder Shayan Zadeh who was a programmer and program manager at Microsoft.

Read - Zoosk blog
View - site