Startup Deep Dive : TrulyMadly — it rejects 43% of sign-ups to prove its matches are real

TrulyMadly built its business on a promise its much bigger rivals never had to make: that the person on the other side of the match is real. The app rejects roughly 43% of new sign-ups before they can start swiping, a filter so aggressive it caps the very user base the company needs to grow (Inc42, September 2022).

The company almost did not live long enough to prove the bet was worth it. A revenue collapse and the exit of two of its three founders in 2019 nearly ended TrulyMadly before its verification-first model had a chance to work. The app running today, with more than 11 million registered users, was rebuilt by a product manager the original founders had once hired (Inc42, September 2022; YourStory, August 2020).

Quick facts

What they do

TrulyMadly is an Indian dating and matchmaking app aimed at 20-to-35-year-olds looking for something more deliberate than a casual swipe. Every new profile goes through a verification layer before it can message anyone: a phone number, a live selfie checked against uploaded photos, and, for a meaningful share of users, a government ID. The company’s pitch to a market crowded with Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and homegrown apps such as Aisle and QuackQuack is narrower and more specific than “more matches”: fewer, more trustworthy profiles, sold as a safety feature to the women whose participation the whole model depends on (Inc42, September 2022; StartupTalky, February 2022).

The origin

The founding idea did not start as a dating app. Co-founder Hitesh Dhingra had been helping look for a match for his sister-in-law through the traditional matrimonial route and came away frustrated by how much of the process ran on unverifiable claims: photos, family background, income, all of it taken on faith. Dhingra, who had earlier built and sold the electronics e-tailer Letsbuy to Flipkart in 2012, teamed up with Sachin Bhatia, a co-founder and former chief marketing officer at MakeMyTrip, and Rahul Kumar, a product manager who had worked at MakeMyTrip and Expedia, to build something between the matrimonial site and the casual dating app: a service for people who wanted a real relationship but did not want their parents choosing it for them (StartupTalky, February 2022; Inc42’s original 2014 profile of the founders). The trio’s shared background in consumer internet and travel e-commerce shaped an early, distinctive design decision: build trust into the product itself, rather than assume users would police it themselves the way early Tinder in India largely did not (Inc42, September 2022).

The struggle years

The first setback showed up in the numbers. TrulyMadly’s revenue fell from ₹7.21 crore in FY17 to ₹3.61 crore in FY18, a roughly 50% decline, even as the company narrowly turned a profit of ₹2.3 lakh that year by cutting expenses by more than half (Entrackr, January 2019). A shrinking top line while claiming a wafer-thin profit is not a business finding its footing; it is a business cutting itself down to survive.

The deeper crisis followed in 2019. Two of the app’s three founders, Hitesh Dhingra and Rahul Kumar, exited the company. Sachin Bhatia stepped back to what reporting later described as a silent partner and mentor role. In their place, the company elevated Snehil Khanor, a product manager who had joined TrulyMadly’s own team years earlier and left in 2016, back into the business as co-founder and CEO, alongside Amit Gupta, previously of the proptech venture FellaHomes and the dating app Delta, as co-founder and CTO (Inc42, September 2022; YourStory, August 2020, which independently references the 2019 leadership change). A startup rebuilding its founding team from the inside, two years after its revenue had halved, is not a routine reshuffle; it is the kind of near-death moment most companies do not come back from.

The turning point

The turnaround is measurable on both sides of 2019. Before it: a company with a halved top line, a profit built entirely on cost-cutting, and two of three founders gone. After it: TrulyMadly says it added 11 million registered users within roughly three years of the Khanor-Gupta rebuild, and its August 2020 funding announcement noted that monthly revenue and new monthly user additions had both tripled since the change in leadership (Inc42, September 2022; YourStory, August 2020). The pandemic added an unplanned tailwind: TrulyMadly’s April 2021 funding round coincided with reported tenfold user growth in urban India during COVID-19 lockdowns, and the company also built a plasma-donor-matching tool as a public-facing goodwill project that period (YourStory, April 2021). None of this reversed the 2019 crisis by itself; it is what the rebuilt team did with the two years afterward that turned a near-death event into the base the company now runs on.

The money behind it

TrulyMadly’s funding has come in small, spaced-out rounds rather than one large raise, reported at roughly $8.9 million in total (Inc42, September 2022):

• August 2014: seed funding of an undisclosed amount around the app’s launch (StartupTalky, February 2022).
• March 2015: Series A of $5.7 million (~₹35 crore) from Helion Venture Partners and Kae Capital, the company’s first institutional backers, aimed at growing the user base to a stated target of 5 million (Business Standard, March 2015; DealStreetAsia).
• August 2020: pre-Series A of ₹8.1 crore from an AngelList syndicate, Inflection Point Ventures and The Chennai Angels, raised soon after the Khanor-Gupta leadership rebuild, earmarked for team and technology (YourStory, August 2020).
• April 2021: pre-Series A of ₹16 crore (~$2.1 million) from Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns and a group of angels including Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and InMobi co-founder Abhay Singhal, at a valuation reported to be roughly four times higher than six months earlier (YourStory, April 2021; Business Standard, April 2021).

What each backer changed: Helion and Kae Capital’s 2015 Series A funded the original growth push under the founding team; the 2020-21 angel and micro-VC syndicate financed the post-2019 rebuild under Khanor, betting on the turnaround rather than the original founding story. No later mega-round or acquisition has been publicly disclosed as of this writing; the company remains independently held and privately run (ZaubaCorp company filing, listing Sachin Bhatia and Sharmila Bhatia as directors).

How it makes money

TrulyMadly runs on subscriptions, not the ad-and-scale model people assume dating apps default to.

• Subscriptions supply 98-99% of revenue, priced from about ₹699 a week to ₹1,799 for 20 weeks (Inc42, September 2022).
• Conversion is thin: only 3-3.5% of free users upgrade to a paid plan within their first 30 days (Inc42, September 2022).
• Average revenue per paying user runs at roughly ₹1,600 a month (Inc42, September 2022).
• Secondary income comes from banner advertising and paid brand tie-ups, including a Starbucks café partnership built around in-person meetups for members (StartupTalky, February 2022).
• The part people get wrong: because Tinder and Bumble lean on scale and advertising to monetise a mostly free user base, observers assume TrulyMadly does the same. It does not; its economics depend almost entirely on a small slice of users paying directly, which is also why the company screens so hard at sign-up rather than opening the funnel wide and monetising with ads later.

The numbers

Public financials are patchy for the years between the 2019 rebuild and FY24, since standalone MCA filings for that stretch were not surfaced in company trackers at the time of writing. The years that are documented show the shape of the business before and after the crisis:

Sources: FY17-FY18 from Entrackr, January 2019, citing regulatory filings; FY24-FY25 from Inc42 Datalabs, 2025, citing MCA filings. Read together, the company has more than tripled revenue from its FY18 trough but has not returned to the profitability it briefly reported that year; losses are narrowing rather than closed.

Where the money comes from

• Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities accounted for 54% of new user additions and 42% of revenue as of the September 2022 reporting period, a larger share than most metro-first Indian consumer apps report at a comparable stage (Inc42, September 2022).
• Metro and Tier 1 cities supply the remaining majority of revenue, reflecting the app’s original, more metro-centric user base from its 2014-2018 years.
• The platform supports 11 vernacular languages, a deliberate push to convert non-English-first users in smaller cities into paying members rather than just registered downloads (Inc42, September 2022).
• The surprise: for a product built around verification and safety for women, TrulyMadly has reported female membership of roughly 20% of its user base, a skew common across Indian dating apps but one that sits uneasily next to the company’s core safety pitch (StartupTalky, February 2022).

The risks

• Scale mismatch against global rivals: Tinder is reported to have more than 20 million active users in India and Bumble around 5 million, dwarfing TrulyMadly’s disclosed user numbers, in market roundups published in 2026; a smaller network directly limits match density, which is the core product experience of any dating app.
• A structural retention ceiling: the company’s own reporting describes a “retention paradox” in which its best-case outcome, a successful match, removes two paying or soon-to-pay users from the platform at once, a dynamic that caps the addressable base in a way that, say, a shopping app does not face (Inc42, September 2022).
• Revenue concentration: with 98-99% of revenue tied to subscriptions and conversion already thin at 3-3.5%, any further slippage in conversion or pricing power has an outsized effect on the topline, with no meaningful advertising cushion to absorb it (Inc42, September 2022).
• Verification friction at the top of the funnel: rejecting roughly 43% of sign-ups protects trust but also means a large share of acquisition spend never converts into an active user at all (Inc42, September 2022).

The takeaway

TrulyMadly’s most instructive decision was not a product feature. It was who the company let run it. When the original founding team’s model stopped working, in a stretch when revenue had halved and the app had not found its footing against Tinder, the company did not paper over the problem with a marketing push or a pivot to a new category. It handed the business to someone who had already worked inside it, and let that person rebuild the trust mechanics the product needed to survive on its own terms. The lesson travels beyond dating apps: a founding insight can be right and the founding team can still be the wrong operators to execute it at the next stage, and recognising that early is cheaper than recognising it late.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded TrulyMadly and when?

Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra and Rahul Kumar founded TrulyMadly, which was incorporated in March 2013 and launched as an app in February 2014. Snehil Khanor and Amit Gupta joined as co-founders in 2019 when the company was rebuilt under new leadership (Inc42, September 2022).

How does TrulyMadly make money?

Almost entirely through subscriptions, priced from about ₹699 a week to ₹1,799 for 20 weeks, which make up 98-99% of revenue. A smaller amount comes from advertising and brand partnerships (Inc42, September 2022).

How much funding has TrulyMadly raised?

Reported at roughly $8.9 million across an undisclosed 2014 seed round, a $5.7 million Series A in March 2015, and two further pre-Series A rounds in August 2020 and April 2021 (Business Standard, March 2015; YourStory, August 2020 and April 2021; Inc42, September 2022).

Is TrulyMadly profitable?

Not currently. It reported a small profit of ₹2.3 lakh in FY18 but posted losses of ₹2.3 crore in FY24 and ₹1.0 crore in FY25, even as revenue grew to ₹12.3 crore that year (Entrackr, January 2019; Inc42 Datalabs, 2025).

How is TrulyMadly different from Tinder or Bumble?

Its core differentiation is mandatory identity verification, including live selfie checks and, for many users, government ID, before a profile can interact with others, rejecting around 43% of applicants. Tinder and Bumble operate with lighter verification and far larger user bases in India (Inc42, September 2022).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “TrulyMadly turns profitable in FY18 but revenue shrinks by 50%”, January 2019
• Inc42, “How Online Dating App TrulyMadly Onboarded 11 Mn+ Users”, September 2022
• Inc42, “Online Dating Startup TrulyMadly Raises INR 35 Cr. From Helion & Kae”, 2015
• Inc42 Datalabs, TrulyMadly financials (FY24-FY25 revenue and profit/loss), 2025
• Business Standard, “Online dating app TrulyMadly raises Rs 35 cr from Helion, Kae Capital”, March 2015
• Business Standard, “TrulyMadly raises Rs 16 crore funding; investors include Paytm founder”, April 2021
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Delhi-based startup TrulyMadly raises Rs 8.1 Cr in Pre-series A round”, August 2020
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] TrulyMadly raises Rs 16 Cr in pre-Series A; valuation jumps 4X in 6 months”, April 2021
• StartupTalky, “TrulyMadly Startup Story – Founder, Revenue, Challenges, Funding and more”, February 2022
• ZaubaCorp, company filing for TrulyMadly Matchmakers Private Limited (CIN U74999DL2013PTC249642)
• DealStreetAsia, “TrulyMadly secures $5.7 million in Series A funding”, 2015

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