SingldOut

» see singldout.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The pitch was that attraction is forty percent chemistry and that the chemistry is legible from a cheek swab. Whatever else you want to say about it, that is a sentence a journalist will print. None of it was reaching me anyway: the kit shipped inside the United States, and the front door was a LinkedIn login, which in 2014 I kept for work and for nothing that involved a swab.

Jana Bayad and Elle France incorporated the company in California in December 2013 and launched the site in July 2014. You signed up, a DNA kit arrived in the post, you swabbed and sent it back. A Toronto lab called Instant Chemistry ran the analysis and the results were posted onto your profile, where they could be compared against everybody else's.

The genes in question were immune system genes, on the long-running theory that scent-mediated mate preference tracks immune variation, plus the serotonin transporter gene, which the company said predicted how a person reacts under pressure. Out of those two readings it claimed to identify up to forty percent of the chemistry of attraction between two people. The Wikipedia article carries medical-citation-needed tags on every one of those claims today. The 2014 press mostly did not bother.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the linkedin part ~

The second gimmick was stranger than the first and got a fraction of the attention. SingldOut ran on LinkedIn accounts, so your dating profile hung off your professional identity. It was sold as verification, which was a real problem nobody had solved in 2014, years before the mainstream apps got around to photo checks.

It also meant the two most reputation-sensitive things a person keeps online were wired to each other by a company with a seed round. That combination reads very differently in 2026 than it did in the launch coverage, where it was reported as a credibility feature.

~ what really happened ~

TechCrunch reported a $600,000 seed round in October 2014. By the company's own account the publicity push was worth around two million dollars in earned media, which is to say the press was worth more than the funding. Business Insider, USA Today, the National Post and Slate all ran it. Slate at least asked whether the science held up.

Then November 2015 and it was gone, sixteen months after opening, with no shutdown story anywhere to match the launch stories. Nobody published what happened to the samples or to the genotype data of the members who mailed them in. The pitch itself survived the company and is still being sold by other names, and it took 23andMe's bankruptcy in 2025 to make the general public think hard about who ends up holding a spit tube when a startup stops trading.

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