How Did a Bangladeshi and a White Guy Create Matrimony App Targeting (among others) Jews, Indians, and East Asians?
Auntie is the sort of app one would expect to find coming out of India or South Korea. People hear the idea and say, “So this is like an arranged marriage app?” The truth is that Auntie is much more nuanced and complex than an arranged marriage app, and the story that led to Auntie’s creation is long and intricate, somewhat revealing the sophistication of the app itself.
Auntie is an app for the new Asia, from Israel to Japan; it is a humble and respectful step forward, a blend of tradition and progress. It is designed to bring together the parents and kids who use it to find love, rather than drive a wedge between them. Auntie is an app for modern family matchmaking. This term, “modern family matchmaking,” is something we have developed to describe what happens on Auntie. It is the coming together of the East and the West, tradition and technology, respect for parents and respect for the younger generation. This could only be created by two entrepreneurs who come from different worlds.
Hart grew up in Silicon Valley, California. Of arranged marriage, rishta matchmaking, family matchmaking, parental matchmaking, and professional matchmaking, Hart had very little exposure. What he did have exposure to was the technology world, app development, and entrepreneurship. Hart grew up seeing first hand the creation of Facebook, Google, and Apple in his own backyard. He learned to understand the power of technology and the historical importance of digitizing human behavior.
In 2017 at the age of 20, Hart moved to India where he worked at an IT company in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, North India. Here he made many friends. Together they went to weddings, temples, and took motorcycle trips into the Himalayas. This was when Hart was first introduced to traditions such as arranged marriage, family matchmaking, and professional matchmaking. It was here where Hart combined the ideas of arranged marriage and family matchmaking and these new cultures and traditions he was being introduced to with his understanding of technology, mobile apps, and entrepreneurship. It struck Hart to create a family matchmaking app, what could sound like an arranged marriage, to serve the modern India, and beyond, where parents and kids consent to work together to find the perfect match.
Hart couldn’t start yet though, so he spent the next few years looking for the right cofounder to start the company with. Eventually Hart found Ahmed, who was the perfect business partner. Ahmed had had somewhat of an inverse experience with Hart. Ahmed grew up in Bangladesh where he understood from a young age the traditions of family matchmaking and the importance of family. He moved to California to study engineering at Stanford when he was a teenager, and it was here where he learned more about entrepreneurship, app development, and technology.
So both Ahmed and Hart, the two founders of Auntie: Family Matchmaking, had reciprocal experiences which made them perfect to start a family matchmaking app, what some may refer to as an “arranged marriage app” even though that doesn’t quite capture it. It is not an app for arranged marriage in the traditional sense, but an app that reflects the unique mix of tradition and modernity that Ahmed grew up with and Hart recognized as an untapped opportunity. It is an app where the tradition of family matchmaking and parental matchmaking are respected, while the desires of the young people and pursuit of love is the number one consideration by the parents. It is an app for the new world where tradition and love are in harmony. Some may call it an app for arranged marriage, some may call it a family matrimony app, some may call it a rishta search or a family matchmaking app. We call it Auntie: Family Matchmaking, and we believe it will change the landscape of dating.
