Sean Rad and engineer Joe Munoz built the original prototype for Tinder, "MatchBox", during a hackathon in February 2012. Sean Rad launched Tinder at a hackathon at the Hatch Labs incubator in West Hollywood, Los Angeles County, California, United States in 2012. As of 2021, Tinder has recorded more than 65 billion matches worldwide.
In 2020, Tinder had 6.2 million subscribers and 75 million monthly active users. Tinder uses a "double opt-in" system, also called "matching", where two users must like each other before they can exchange messages. On Tinder, users " swipe right" to like or "swipe left" to dislike other users' profiles, which include their photos, a short bio, and some of their interests. Tinder is an online dating and geosocial networking application launched in 2012.