Wave makes it fun & safe for you to find your friends and get found by them. With the most modern geo-technology you can stay connected by sharing live locations, always on a private map. Wave has millions of happy users all over the world.

With Wave you can:

- View the real-time location of your contacts upon a request on a private map.
- Create groups with your friends, colleagues or family members to view their real-time location and chat with them for free.
- Choose the duration or start an unlimited session with the ones that matter the most.
- View the estimated time of arrival to your contacts.
- Set editable meeting points for you and your friends on the map.
- Navigate to the meeting point without changing to a different app and call an Uber if your destination is too far.
+ So much more!

FRIEND & FAMILY LOCATOR

Wave makes your life easier whenever you’re about to meet up with your loved ones or simply need to know where someone is. You can also check each others’ estimated time of arrival and set a meeting point at any moment. If you don’t feel like walking, tap on the meeting point and call an Uber.

STAY CONNECTED

The best way to avoid worrying about the closest family members and friends is to stay connected. With unlimited waves, if both of you or the whole group agrees, you can start an infinite session and check each other’s real-time location whenever you wish. The sessions can be expired at any moment. And don’t worry about your battery life, we’ve nailed it! ;)

TRAVELLING MADE SIMPLE

How easy would it be to travel if we all only shared the same interests! No stress: Wave lets you enjoy travelling at its best! See where the others are, send audios/send pics/type via chat and get back together anytime!

ON THE ROAD

No matter if you are in a traffic jam or heading far away, share your live location so that you can keep your hands firmly on the wheel and your family or friends can see your time of arrival. No more typing while driving, no more dangerous status updates, no more accidents.

BIG EVENTS

Happiness is only real when shared. When you’re finally in the long-awaited concert, festival or football match, please don’t miss out and watch the show all by yourself. Find your friends easily at any moment using Wave!


*Wave is the best location tracker app of the market, it has more than 11 millions of users and works worldwide. Wave has been featured in the prestigious Tech Republic as an innovative app for meeting friends or relatives and traveling https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/photos-16-ways-tech-is-changing-the-tourism-industry/.*

Wave Let’s Meet App - No more “Where are you’s”.

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The pandemic could have doomed online dating. Instead, it sent singles swiping more than ever before. Sanctions on in-person meetups drove the adoption of new products, like video dating, and persuaded more people to pay for premium features. All in all, the industry had a chartbusting year.

“Acceptance and normalization of online dating was already underway before Covid-19,” says John Madigan, an analyst at business research firm IBISWorld, but tailwinds from the pandemic have accelerated growth. In the next four years, IBISWorld predicts that the global online dating industry will increase its worth from $5.3 billion to $6.4 billion.

Where there is money—or at least the smell of it—there are also startups. In the United States, at least 50 dating companies were founded between 2019 and 2021, according to data from Crunchbase. While that rate hasn’t changed much over the past decade, the total amount of funding has grown. These new startups represent a few fresh ideas in the dating space, and a hope that the next dating unicorn could emerge after a year of isolation.

For the most part, newer dating apps focus on Gen Z, a demographic that came of age in a post-Tinder world and represents the lion’s share of the industry’s projected revenue. Snack, which bills itself as a sort of “TikTok meets Tinder,” invites users to upload short videos for potential matches to scroll through. So does Lolly, an app that lets you “match with people while exploring sweet video content.” Marc Baghadjian, Lolly’s 22-year-old cofounder, says the app’s focus on video gives its users a better online dating experience. “You could be funny, you could be interesting, you could be talented, and you can show all of that in a video, in a way that you never could with your pictures.”

Feels also features a carousel of short-form videos on profiles, where people are supposed to express themselves in more dimensions. It’s marketed as the “anti dating app,” for people who believe that “swiping is boring” and that platforms like Tinder are too superficial. Laurent de Tapol, Feels’ cofounder, says the app has attracted 150,000 users since launching in April. He also acknowledges that most of those users will also create accounts on mainstream apps like Tinder and Hinge, if they don’t have profiles on them already. But de Tapol hopes people will be attracted to the experience on Feels, “where they can share much more about who they are, what they like, and express their very unique personality.”

Other dating apps eschew images altogether. Lex, a dating app for “queer, trans, gender non-conforming, two spirit, and non-binary people,” is inspired by newspaper personals: Its profiles use only text. So Synced, based in London, matches people based on their Myers-Briggs personality type.

Singles might be ready for some fresh ideas in dating, but these startups will largely be competing with each other—not with the industry whales. A single company, Match Group, is behind the largest online dating brands, including Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Match; altogether it represents nearly a third of the market, according to an October 2020 report from IBISWorld. eHarmony controls another 12 percent. The rest is divided among some 2,000 dating companies, the majority of which “operate with a market share of less than 1 percent.” For the most part, the little guys compete with each other, doing little to unseat Match Group as the dominant player.

Which is one reason investors have hesitated to fund dating startups. Andrew Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, summed up several others in a 2015 blog post: It's hard to retain users, there's built-in churn, and profitable exits are unusual. A 2019 analysis by Crunchbase found that while there were a number of new entrants into the online dating space, the venture capital didn’t follow. Without substantial backing from investors, dating startups have an even harder time competing with the bigger players.

Since 2019, though, a few dating startups have bucked the trend and hit it big. Hinge, which once marketed itself as “the anti Tinder,” was acquired by Match Group in 2019 (for an undisclosed amount). Bumble, founded by ex-Tinder employees as a female-friendly alternative to Tinder, raised $2.2 billion in its IPO this February, and has exceeded expectations on the public market.

Bumble’s success has been a flashpoint for the industry, says Alex Durrant, who founded the UK-based dating app Jigsaw in 2016. “We’ve had a ton of inbounds from investors, although we’re not fundraising right now,” says Durrant. “Suddenly people are like, ‘Maybe we need a dating app in our portfolio.’” According to Crunchbase, total funding for dating startups in the US has increased from $4.8 million in 2016 to more than $26 million in 2020—still representing a fraction of the overall VC industry.

Jigsaw, which expanded to the United States this year, tries to stand apart with its own gimmick: Profile photos are covered up with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and are only revealed through sending messages back and forth. (Another new dating app, called S'more, similarly blurs profile photos until people start talking.) Durrant says the goal of his app to get people to talk to each other, not to consume each others’ content like a social media feed. “For us, it’s all about building a connection with another person,” he says. “I think that’s the core issue that isn’t being solved.”

Now that Covid-19 restrictions have been lifted in most parts of the country, young dating startups will face a new, and possibly more challenging, test: Whether they can survive the post-vax summer. It’s one thing for a fledgling dating app to compete with a Goliath like Tinder. It’s another to compete with newly reopened bars. Online dating, full of screens and gimmicks, comes with its own forms of exhaustion, as The Atlantic’s Julie Beck noted years ago. “As a result of the pandemic, people may be more dating-app-fatigued than ever before,” says Madigan. Match Group can deal with the churn that comes from swiping burnout; for smaller apps, it could be disastrous.

More Great WIRED Stories

More people than ever are finding love online with apps like Tinder, Bumble and Grindr. However, love is not what everyone is trying to find. Sometimes, what people are looking for is someone to help them fulfil their sexual fantasies. Also for some, the perfect life partner must be someone who understands their deepest desires, sexual or otherwise.

Until now, there has not been an app on the market that helps straight people, in particular,* match on what they want in bed. 

Waves is a dating app that aims to make it easy for its members to find exactly what they like, and in quite some detail. Created by brothers Emerson Hsieh, 20, and Morris Hsieh, 22, the app is currently one of Y Combinator’s summer batch.

Everyone knows that a dating app can be a quick fix to finding a one night stand, but they are not set up this way. Whether people are using them to find a no-strings-attached hook-up or a committed spouse, the most widely used apps all operate under the innocent guise as a modern means to find love. 

Additionally, they do not aid their members in navigating the awkward and taboo topic of unspoken desires.

We might be in 2019, but for some people, bringing up a foot fetish on a first date could still be a little uncomfortable. 

Fear of rejection is already a symptom of dating apps. Something that compels people to present themselves in a way that they think is more appealing to others, but, in doing so, the side effect could be that they miss out on matching with someone that is actually right for them. 

Waves say that they are a “Tinder-style dating app that promotes sex-positivity and prohibits kink-shaming by only showing potential matches who are comfortable with each other’s bedroom fantasies, preferences, and fetishes.”

To help facilitate this, Waves members must first fill out a detailed section of their profile, allowing the app to aid in matching them with others who have also checked the same preferences.

In choosing those preferences, you can indicate your interested in each one with the following prompts: ‘Yes,’ ‘Hard No,’ and ‘Discuss.’ 

The number of matching preferences, not the specific preferences themselves, are shown to potential matches, unless the user selects the option that explicitly grants their consent to have their preferences constantly displayed on their profile to every potential match on the app. There are also options that can allow a user to automatically show preferences to a specific match.

“It basically works like this: If you’re into ropes, you put that in Waves, and all your potential matches are also people who are into ropes,” says Emerson in a statement. 

A Forbes article reports that, “The Hsieh brothers designed the app with the keeping the psychological safety of the user in mind by giving them control over how their preferences are used and shared with their matches. These preferences act as filters to ensure that users avoid engaging in activities they find uncomfortable.”

Solving a communication issue

Dating apps are so popular, in part because they open up the world to new people who one might otherwise never had the chance to meet. They provide opportunities to communicate with people, which is important as societies begin to report loneliness as an epidemic. 

But, what many of them don’t do is help people connect on a more detailed level. When it comes to sex, a significant part of romantic relationships, it can be a difficult topic for partners, both new and old, to discuss sex and communicate what they do and don’t like.

“We’re hoping to create a judgement-free environment for sexual exploration and open discussions around tastes before meeting with matches. Unlike the usual encounter: where the discussion happens in bed – when it’s both too late and embarrassing to bring up.”

Could Waves actually be safer than other apps?

Creating a dating app is not something the brothers always had their sights set on. Emerson Hsieh is a rising junior at the University of California-Berkeley, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, and Morris Hsieh is a third-year medical student.

Before Waves, they had their sights set on creating a MedTech startup, but a friend made them see an unmet need in today’s dating apps. 

“We started Waves out of problems that our friends faced with online dating. A friend of ours got choked by a guy she met on Tinder and did not enjoy it; filtering out incompatible matches and providing a space to openly talk about bedroom preferences allows us to open the (otherwise embarrassing) conversations early and to set our safety boundaries,” says Emerson. 

The Hseih brothers may have chosen the right venture to go into. According to Market Research, the U.S. online dating industry is projected to be $3.2 billion by 2020.

Seeing as their app helps users find a deeper connection where others fail, there is room for them to see success in a highly profitable market. 

*To be clear, Grindr, the popular LGBT app, helps its members match on basic sexual preferences.*

Tags: apps, dating, sex

Related Shakers

Waves Dating Overview

Founded Year2019

LocationSunnyvale, United States

Company StageSeed

Total Funding$150K

Last Funding Round$150K, Seed, Oct 01, 2019

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The developer, Wave Dating LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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  Family Sharing

  Up to six family members can use this app with Family Sharing enabled.

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