Before meeting a potential partner on Sitch, users talk to an AI assistant. They share their interests, expectations, and what they consider nonnegotiable in a relationship. Their answers form the profile the app uses to look for possible connections among its members. Then come the introductions: a potential partner and an explanation of why the two might be compatible. Only if both accept does the assistant open a shared chat and introduce them.

Launched in December 2024 and co-founded by Nandini Mullaji and Chad DePue, the app operates in the United States, with service available in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin. The initial conversation can also take place over the phone: Mullaji lent her voice to an AI version of herself that gathers preferences and experiences through conversation.

A human team also takes part in the selection process, reviewing profiles before admitting users. Members can then provide feedback on the people suggested and, on their dates, helping guide subsequent matches.

For Mullaji, Sitch is not her first venture into dating apps. Raised in Mumbai, she graduated from Georgetown and earned an MBA and a master’s degree in education at Stanford. After helping launch Bumble in India, she developed Setup in 2023, arranging dates around users’ weekly availability. Making better use of time was already central to the project.

With DePue, who previously worked at Snapchat and Microsoft, Mullaji expanded the project using large language models, the technology behind tools such as ChatGPT. Matchmaking - the work of getting to know two people and suggesting an introduction based on potential compatibility - became the model for a digital intermediary.

That role fits into a growing familiarity with AI, including in people’s personal lives. According to the Pew Research Center, in February 2026, 49% of U.S. adults reported using chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, up from 33% in 2024; one in ten turned to them for emotional support or advice. Opening up to an artificial interlocutor is therefore an experience that predates - and extends beyond - the use of dating apps.

Sitch’s approach also touches on another digital habit: comparing options. Smartphones have accustomed us to discovering products, assessing them, and making purchases through a screen. In online dating, the marketplace metaphor is central to “relationshopping,” a term introduced by Rebecca D. Heino, Nicole B. Ellison, and Jennifer L. Gibbs in their 2010 study, “Relationshopping: Investigating the market metaphor in online dating,” published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The researchers examined how users evaluated potential partners against their desired characteristics and shaped their own self-presentation to attract interest. With an intermediary such as Sitch, some of that selection work shifts from the user to the service.

The criteria that guide the search remain personal. In a January 2026 survey by U.S. polling firm SSRS, 51% of people who had used dating sites or apps considered similar family values very important; 33% said the same about political beliefs, and 31% about religious or spiritual beliefs. These considerations go beyond the impression a profile makes and help explain the foundations on which people seek a connection.

The search bar for love comes at a price, too: Sitch’s App Store listing includes a monthly subscription for $29.99. In the U.S. store, the app has an average rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars from approximately 2,600 ratings - a measure of users’ experience with the service, rather than the romantic outcomes of their dates.

Users pay for a selection process that combines algorithms and human oversight, hoping for an elective affinity. How far trust in that process shapes expectations of a connection remains an open question. Between suggested compatibility and lived experience, one possibility remains to be reckoned with: the encounter may prove the prediction wrong.

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