San Francisco — A sticker on a wall in Lisbon caught Katya Gratcheva’s attention last fall: “No dating or networking. Just breakfast.”
It led the married 52-year-old, tired of the transactional networking she encountered at home in Washington, D.C., to download an app called The Breakfast. For a fee, it pairs strangers seeking deep conversation for morning meals in 17 cities worldwide.
Gratcheva, who is Russian, ultimately matched with a young Ukrainian woman whose willingness to discuss the conflict between their two countries felt transformational. “She was able to see a friend in me even though I represent the nation that bombed her country and killed her friends,” Gratcheva said.
Gratcheva estimates that she’s attended about 30 such breakfasts with strangers in the past nine months. She has lots of company: Apps that offer to connect strangers seeking platonic connections are having a moment. Although they share many features with dating apps, they bill themselves as tools for networking or community-building, not for finding romance, with many like Breakfast targeting isolated remote workers and digital nomads.
In July, the dating app Bumble, which also has modes for networking and friend-finding, completed its acquisition of Geneva, an app designed to help people make new friends to spend time with offline. Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said on an earnings call this month that fostering platonic bonds is core to the company’s future business. “What we are hearing from our young users is that they are feeling lonely and disconnected,” she said.
Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Timeleft, an app that arranges Wednesday night dinners for six-person groups in 170 cities across 37 countries, says fatigue with dating apps is driving people toward…
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