WTF?! There is an app for just about every problem, including tackling thorny relationship issues. But who are the people behind these creations? Unsurprisingly, many of these are technophiles who apply the same tools they use at work to their personal relationships. Venture capital is following this trend, but like many VC-backed projects, the question of viability looms in the background.
About a year ago, Sami Packard, an Accenture consultant living in the San Francisco area, hit a rough spot in her marriage when she and her husband couldn't agree on where to live. So she organized a two-day off-site retreat complete with a detailed agenda to work on the relationship, with Packard assuming the role of both attendee and facilitator.
The tools the couple used during the retreat were the standard corporate fare ranging from vision boards to bar charts to writing exercises.
When she returned, Packard documented their results in a Google Slides deck and published her story on Medium and her LinkedIn account.
Fast forward one year and Packard is convinced she is on to something. Since last year, she has run several offsites for other couples and has come to the conclusion that relationship work was something she wanted to pursue full time.
Packard has launched a company called Coupledom, which offers both DIY offsite retreat packages as well as consulting.
According to the San Francisco Standard, which recently chronicled her journey, Packard represents an emerging trend: tech tools and, more interestingly, venture capital funding aimed at optimizing relationships.
One example is Ali Maggioncalda, who raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to found Lovewick, an app designed to help "couples grow & stay in love, without it feeling like work."
Silvia de Denaro Vieira, the founder of Coexist, a home management app designed to help couples share the mental load, didn't garner nearly as much interest, so she joined Techstars Oakland and raised $120,000 to build the app, which came out in beta this May.
Other examples include Eka Ventures' $3.6 million seed funding round for Paired, a "relationship care" app designed for couples. TMV and Serena Ventures participated in a $5 million seed funding round for OURS, a startup offering "modern premarital counseling" through a digital platform.
Then there is the Dating Group VC, a venture capital arm of The Dating Group, which specifically invests in startups within the dating and relationship space. They focus on technologies that help people meet, create networks, or develop friendships globally.
My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life. Here's a screenshot of our set-up.
– Ben Lang (@benln) April 7, 2024
I turned this into a template, let me know if you'd like to see it! pic.twitter.com/0bgZWR3jbS
If this is a new trend, though, it is a slow-forming one, littered with some failures along the way.
There is no online sign that the Dating Group VC is still in operation, for example. And these apps, which are trying to make a buck as they help people, also have to contend with the DIY crowd in this space, where such efforts can gain a huge following on social media. Earlier this year, for example, investor Benjamin Lang posted his marriage-management Notion template to X, where it received 4.6 million views and led to a New York Times story.
Techies are managing their marriages the same way they run their careers
