Key Takeaways

“Overtone is not a dating app,” Hinge founder Justin McLeod wrote in a recent blog post. “Overtone is a service.” 

Well, that answers our most pressing question about Overtone, the dating concept that McLeod left Hinge for back in December 2025. Now, McLeod has announced that Overtone is mere months away from launching in certain regions. There’s only one problem: We’re still not really sure what Overtone actually is. 

We know that Overtone’s most recent round of funding ended with an $18 million vote of confidence from FirstMark Capital, Pace Capital, and Match Group. We know that McLeod’s status as Hinge founder and Match Group heavyweight makes him a force to be reckoned with. 

We know that Overtone has to be more than another swipe-happy, AI-enabled attempt at “disrupting” an industry that, for the life of it, can’t seem to be disrupted long enough to see much meaningful growth. 

And perhaps most interestingly, we know that McLeod is grappling with what it means to be an AI-forward dating company in the year 2026. He makes it clear that he plans to use AI “thoughtfully and ethically” in an effort to create something new — a tall order, when consumers both crave and reject anything with too much, and too little, friction. 

What Does McLeod Think of AI? 

According to his blog post, McLeod simultaneously embraces AI and acknowledges its limits. 

“The opportunities and perils of AI are staggering,” McLeod wrote. “I worry deeply about its misuse, especially around something as intimate and sacred as love.” 

This doesn’t mean he isn’t willing to use AI at Overtone, however. 

“I believe AI holds tremendous promise, in all kinds of ways,” he said. “But we’ll only realize that promise if we design products with meticulous intention, ethics intact, aligning with what we as humans require on the deepest level. AI should always stand behind us, not between us.” 

AI is both revolutionary and risky. It has the potential to overwhelm platforms, to drown out the type of nuance necessary to understanding real compatibility. McLeod emphasizes that, in the wrong hands, AI can be a detriment to the matchmaking process. 

This is why he mentions the ethics of AI. It seems to me that McLeod is trying to reassure us: With him at the helm, Overtone won’t look or feel like the dating apps of today. It will be something with increased friction, less AI, and more humanity. 

McLeod Doesn’t Only Want to Change Apps — He Wants to Change Matchmaking 

McLeod says we’ve accepted what he calls the “precarious funnel of like to match to chat to date” for so long because it’s the best that technology could give us (it’s worth noting that Hinge, naturally, contributed to this funnel as well). Now, McLeod says Overtone can “eliminate [these steps] entirely.” 

It’s time to “bring back” a different form of matchmaking, he says. Only this time, it will be defined by relationship science, not by one’s whims. And instead of relying on the continually-evolving dating app algorithm — or, worse, using AI to write messages and create profiles for you — Overtone will rely on human expertise … and, well, AI, too, of course.  

For McLeod, using AI in an “ethical way” — which he claims is a priority at Overtone — comes down to delegation. Instead of using AI to, say, “support” conversations between two matches (i.e. do all the talking), he says he wants it to help on the actual matchmaking side of things. Let humans do the talking, and AI determine the best matches. 

After all, if we’ve learned anything from swipe fatigue, it’s that we don’t always make the best matchmakers in our own love lives. 

“On paper,” he says, “thousands might look like a good match for you. In reality, compatibility lives in the nuance.” We’re living in a world where daters both crave nuance and reject the self-work it takes to access authentic nuance. The solution to this, McLeod says, is our own voice. 

But from here, McLeod’s vision for Overtone — at least publicly — gets vague. All we know for sure is that it involves using user-generated audio and video during the matchmaking process. 

At the very least, he has explained what Overtone won’t be. “[Overtone is] not a social platform with profiles that reduce people to stats, quotes and photos,” he explained. “There are no opaque, algorithmic feeds trained on split-second impulses. And there’s no juggling likes, matches and chats across many people at once.”

The Public’s Love/Hate Relationship with AI 

McLeod wants us to know that there are real humans involved in bringing Overtone to life. And in an industry that’s starting to look more like a self-driving car every day, recognizable human names carry a lot of weight. 

Esther Perel! Diana Chapman! Spencer Rascoff! A veritable who’s-who of media-conscious leaders in the dating world are backing Overtone. 

But even though the people behind Overtone do everything they can to convince us that it’s a human product for human daters, you can’t deny the fact that Overtone has been shaped by, and relies heavily on, AI technology — something some daters are starting to resent. 

*One publication referred to Overtone as something “straight out of Black Mirror.” On Reddit — an admittedly cynical place — people wondered if any dating company could ever really reverse the damage done by AI and swiping. 

“At this point. I interpret implementing AI as a struggle to stay relevant. Similar to how I interpret aggressive ad campaigns as an indicator of poor quality,” one user said. 

You can practically feel another user’s dating fatigue through the screen: “tbh I was going to say this doesn’t sound much worse than the average dating app but that says more about dating in 2026 than anything,” this user said. 

So, What’s Overtone’s Chances?

Despite (or because of) the cloak and dagger, Overtone probably has everything it needs to attract a crowd. But I’m curious: Is an AI-supported dating service really any better than an AI-supported dating app? 

Or better yet, does getting rid of the swipe functionality really matter if a dating platform or service doesn’t quickly provide the meaningful connections people crave? 

Overtone seems to hinge (no pun intended) its success on users welcoming friction back into the matchmaking process, ostensibly through audio and video recordings. This isn’t a new concept, as other, smaller companies in the industry have made similar claims about friction’s role in the future of matchmaking. 

The gist? That matchmaking only works when we put in the effort to show our authentic selves. 

The VC groups that have invested in Overtone might just tell us more about where Overtone hopes to go. You can find FirstMark Capital at the beginning of quite a few success stories: Pinterest, Shopify, Airbnb, and DraftKings, to name a few. All of these companies have become major players in the lifestyle space.

Perhaps McLeod and the people investing in Overtone hope it will become, if not the next Tinder or Hinge, then the next big thing in dating. McLeod certainly thinks that this kind of reinvention is possible, even as AI fatigue grows: 

“As I look to the future of dating, I believe we’re at an inflection point where we can move beyond refining the existing model, and instead completely reimagine how we solve the persistent challenges daters face,” he said in the blog post. I would have my doubts if he hadn’t done it once before, with Hinge.