“Someone said, ‘I was on Tinder and it sucks to be Black on here.’ And that was the moment where the light bulb went off.”
“Helping Black people to stop sliding in DMs since ’14,” is Brian Gerrard’s Twitter bio and he says it defines his vision pretty accurately.
Gerrard cofounded the app Bae, which is essentially Tinder for Black and brown people, with his brother, Justin. Based in Fort Greene, he’s currently out on the West Coast raising money for a seed round. He says that the company is looking to raise several million dollars, and is almost there already.
We caught up with him by phone this week to find out more about how Bae is going to change the game for mobile dating:
TB: How’d you get the idea for the app?
BG: The idea came to us in a lot of ways. We saw that it’s faster easier and better to meet people online because it’s a little more efficient. We saw that from looking at the data and just Black experience on Tinder. I talked to a Black friend who said he’d swipe thousands of times and he’d only get five matches. A comparable white guy got about 50 in the same time.
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