Muzmatch defiant after Tinder owner Match sues for 'copying'

Marriage website founder Shahzad Younas pledges to fight claims at UK hearing later this month

Muzmatch founder Shahzad Younas plans to contest the claims. Photo: Muzmatch

The founder of the world’s largest Muslim dating app, Muzmatch, has said he will defend the brand against a lawsuit filed by American dating powerhouse Match Group for trademark infringement.

British-Asian Shahzad Younas, who founded Muzmatch in 2011 as a marriage website for Muslims, will face Match Group, the brand behind the popular dating apps Tinder, Hinge and OKCupid, at a hearing at the UK Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court (IPEC) in London later this month.

“The whole reason why we exist is because they don't serve our market and never have,” Mr Younas told The National.

“Our markets are separate and it actually hurts us to be confused with Match Group and Tinder so we defend the brand, hence why we go to trial" on January 17 and 18."

Match Group, which claims it “pioneered the concept of online dating” more than 20 years ago, has accused Muzmatch of using the word “match” in its website’s metadata to help boost its profile in internet searches.

Muzmatch’s keyword tags include “match-muslim” and “uk-muslim-match”, Match Group said, claiming the tags are an “attempt to ride on the coat-tails” of its registered marks.

However, Muzmatch said it will fight the claims because Match does not have a monopoly over the word “match” in dating searches.

The company said the brand's name is a play on the words muz for Muslim and match for matchmaking, with the company's sole focus to act as an online space for single Muslims to meet and marry.

While the start-up began as an online matchmaking site, it pivoted to become an app in 2015, with a valid US registration in place for the wordmark Muzmatch since 2015.

While it also has valid wordmarks for its name in France and Germany, Match Group opposed the company's EU trademark registration, asking Muzmatch to stop using its name — something the UK-based firm refused, although it did make some visual changes to its branding.

Match Group then initiated the first of four takeover offers for Muzmatch in 2017, with the final offer coming through in 2018 for $35m, which Mr Younas said he refused.

“I did not think it was a fair [offer] for our value and struggled to see what magic they would bring to us,” he said.

Then, in 2019, Match Group purchased Egyptian matchmaking app Harmonica, now known as Hawaya — a direct rival of Muzmatch.

Months later, the US company filed a suit against Muzmatch at the IPEC, claiming trademark infringement around the use of the Muzmatch brand, before following up in March with a separate suit in the US alleging patent infringement around the app's use of the swipe gesture, as well as cyber-piracy in relation to the branding.

“For the US lawsuit, we started to defend ourselves, but it becomes very expensive in the US. We're a start-up, we don't have that kind of money and in the end it didn't make sense for us to try to fight them in the US. So, in more of an economic judgment, we settled with Match Group to close that off”, Mr Younas said.

The company also made some changes to the app, removing the 'swiping' feature.

After successfully completing a $7 million Series A funding round in 2019, Mr Younas said he hoped to become “ a Muslim-focused tech unicorn”.

The company had 5 million members in 2021, and now has 60 staff members, with 150,000 people across the globe meeting their spouse on the site.

Users of matrimonial apps say they give them far more choice than traditional arranged-marriage set-ups. Photo: Muzmatch

Mr Younas, a former algorithmic sales trader at Morgan Stanley who set up the company in his bedroom, quit his job in 2014 to develop the app full-time, with the company now operating in almost every country in the world and in 15 languages.

Meanwhile, Match Group, which employs 2,000 people worldwide, has a market capitalisation of about $37 billion and was added to the S&P 500 in September last year.

“We're worth a fraction of that,” Mr Younas said. “And we've wasted a stupid amount of money on all of this. It's a waste of time, money and energy, especially for a start-up trying to go as far as we can with fairly limited resources.”