She & HER · Investor Brief

The Signal

The market you can measure is not the market that shows up.

In behavioral economics, stated demand and revealed demand are different animals. Women don't answer surveys about platforms that don't exist yet — they arrive, all at once, the moment a product crosses their trust threshold. In 2025, the market ran this experiment in public.

Exhibit A · The demand shock

Tea proved the demand

Women-only dating-safety app, launched quietly in 2023 with no venture capital and no paid acquisition
July 2025: #1 free app on the US App Store — ahead of ChatGPT
4M+ users flooded in within weeks
Pure latent demand: women who never appeared in any market-sizing spreadsheet

Exhibit B · The trust collapse

Tea proved the moat

Weeks later: breaches exposed 72,000 images and 1.1M private messages
October 2025: removed from the App Store
The lesson: in women-first platforms, trust infrastructure is not a feature — it is the product
Demand arrives instantly; only safety architecture determines who keeps it

Tea revealed the demand and fumbled the trust. She & HER is engineered in that exact order of operations — safety first, then scale. Our CTO built trust systems at Google Safe Browsing. This is not our first rodeo; it's our specialty.

The Market

The visible market, the known market, and the market nobody has counted.

Legacy sizing counts households. Behavioral reality counts people — including the majority of sapphic women who never show up in a census cell because they aren't partnered, aren't out, or aren't served by a single-outcome app. And the structure just shifted: in May 2025, Match Group — parent of Tinder — acquired HER, the only at-scale sapphic platform (13M users). The independent, queer-led lane is open.

686K

female-female couple households in the US. The visible floor — it only counts women already partnered and cohabiting.

US Census ACS, 2023

13M+

US LGBTQ+ women — 10% of US women. And 56% of LGBTQ+ adults are bisexual: a majority today's platforms undercount and underserve.

Gallup, 2024

31%

of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+ — nearly 1 in 3. Every year, the addressable market ages in. A demographic escalator, not a niche.

Gallup, 2024

0.5%

of all 2020–2022 US startup capital went to LGBTQ+ founders. The funding gap is the arbitrage — and why this demand keeps going unmet.

StartOut, 2023

The Product

Single-outcome apps are a behavioral design failure. We fixed the mechanism.

There is exactly one at-scale sapphic app — and Match Group owns it now. Everything else queer women are offered is a mainstream swipe app retrofitted after the fact. Either way, the mechanism is the same: when the only win condition is a romantic match, every session is high-stakes, and loss aversion does the rest — burnout, deletion, churn. She & HER redefines dating with three valid outcomes, so every session can end in a win.

Behavioral principle 01

Loss aversion, defused.

On swipe apps, a session without a match is a loss — and losses hurt roughly twice as much as wins feel good. Three outcomes mean the "failure state" almost never fires. Lower stakes, longer lifetimes.

Behavioral principle 02

Variable rewards, replaced.

Legacy apps run slot-machine intermittent reinforcement tuned for engagement metrics — which users increasingly recognize and resent. Intentional pacing trades dopamine loops for alignment, the thing queer women actually report wanting.

Behavioral principle 03

Three reasons to return.

Habit formation needs recurring triggers. A single-outcome app has one; we have three. Community and self-discovery keep users active between romantic arcs — retention compounds, CAC amortizes, network effects deepen.

The status quo — one incumbent, plus retrofits

Built on the swipe assumption

Swipe loops tuned for engagement metrics
One outcome (romantic match), and the value ends there
Heteronormative defaults retrofitted for queer users
Safety as marketing copy
No connective tissue past the chat

She & HER

Built for finding your human

Intentional pacing. Alignment over volume.
Three valid outcomes: romantic, self, community
Queer-led product, with queer-built defaults
FAANG-grade trust and safety as core architecture
Bridge to IRL via an executed Pride circuit

The Model

Three outcomes. Four ways we make money.

Most dating apps monetize one thing: the romantic funnel. Our three-outcome mechanism creates four revenue surfaces — consumer, community, business, and enterprise — and the community and partnership lanes are already generating proof in the market.

$15/mo

B2C · Romantic → Subscription. Freemium core with a premium tier at the category benchmark — HER premium and Tea both price near $15/mo, and Tea reached ~$200K/mo self-funded at that price point.

Benchmark: HER · Tea, 2025

IRL

Community → Events & affiliates. Ticketed events and venue affiliates produced with VisioNoir Group — the experiential agency behind activations for BMW, The NFL, Brown-Forman, and Harry Winston — scaled across the cities we've already activated, anchored by the Pearl Bar affiliate model.

Live today: VisioNoir Group · Pearl Bar Houston

B2B

Community → The Marketplace. A women-only marketplace inside the app where businesses host their storefronts — wellness and therapy, fashion and beauty, travel, intimacy, live virtual events. The marketplace is the ad surface: brands reach the community without breaking its trust. Partnership lane already proven at ReplenishHER, on the bill with Pfizer, Lilly, Merck & HerKind.

MVP surface at launch · nothing like it exists for sapphic women

B2E

Enterprise → Insight & testing markets. Enterprises test products, messaging, and logic through in-app conversations and questions, and get the results back as behavioral-insight dashboards. Partners get access to the data, never the people — a privacy-preserving, data-centered window into a net-new market.

Built on our behavioral-economics ML core

Data is money. Connections are money. The four surfaces compound: subscription funds the product, events deepen local liquidity, the marketplace monetizes attention without ads-as-pollution, and enterprise insight turns our behavioral core into a revenue line — so CAC falls as the community grows, instead of rising with ad prices.

The Moat

Three reinforcing moats. Technical, structural, and cultural.

i. Technical

FAANG-grade trust & safety, built in from day one.

The exact capability Tea's collapse proved decisive. Our CTO architected core systems at Google Safe Browsing and Android Privacy Sandbox. Our CEO holds an MS in Bioinformatics and 15+ years in ML at Google, Microsoft, and Cambridge. Behavioral-economics fluency and applied-AI personalization are how we compete. Retention is the metric we engineer for.

ii. Structural

Three reasons to come back.

Most dating apps optimize for one outcome (romance) and lose retention the second a match works, or doesn't. Our redefinition gives users three reasons to come back: romantic alignment, self-discovery, community. Retention goes up. CAC goes down. Network effects compound.

iii. Cultural

Queer-led, with a Pride pipeline competitors can't replicate.

NYC Pride and the UK Pride tour already executed. WorldPride Amsterdam 2026 activation and logo placement secured — July 25 to August 8, the largest Pride gathering in the world this year. Experiential program run with VisioNoir Group — the cultural-architecture agency trusted by BMW, The NFL, Brown-Forman, and Harry Winston. Pearl Bar Houston as anchor affiliate. Earned media on Fox 26 with a return slate booked. Distribution is hard to buy and easy for us to compound — and the incumbent just lost its independence to Match Group.

The Traction

Three countries in ten days — and a fall slate already booked.

This is no longer a pipeline of promises. The launch happened, in public, at NYC Pride — then went international within the week. Next: WorldPride Amsterdam, July 25 – August 8 — the She & HER activation and logo at the largest Pride event in the world this year.

50K

reach during NYC Pride launch weekend — beta opened to the waitlist June 28

32K+

on the waitlist — up from 2K+ before the NYC launch, with zero paid acquisition

countries in 10 days: NYC Pride, the UK Pride tour, and the Netherlands (June 28 – July 8)

53K/mo

monthly content impressions on @sheandherapp — organic discovery reaching far beyond our follower base

Executed & booked

NYC Pride — beta launchJune 28 · Executed
UK Pride tour + NetherlandsJun 29 – Jul 8 · Executed
WorldPride AmsterdamJul 25 – Aug 8 · Canal Parade Aug 1 · Activation + logo
Martha's Vineyard week · ReplenishHERAug 9–16 · Named partner on the bill with Pfizer, Lilly, Merck & HerKind
LWT Summit, NYCOct · Founder speaking
Uber Innovator ConferenceOct · Founder speaking
AfroTech, HoustonNov · Mainstage speaker · ~40K attendees
VisioNoir GroupExperiential agency partner · BMW · NFL · Harry Winston clientele
Pearl Bar HoustonAnchor affiliate
Fox 26 Houston (Nightcap)Press · Return slate booked

The Team

Operators who've shipped at scale, and care about this community.

CEO & Founder

Desirée Yvonne Mayon

15+ years in ML and data science across Google, Microsoft / Xbox, Etsy, Nordstrom, and the University of Cambridge. MS in Bioinformatics (Texas A&M). Built recommendation, ranking, and behavioral systems at consumer scale. Built the tech, the product, and the nonprofit herself — and spent two years researching how queer women actually want to connect online before writing a single line of product spec.

Ex-Google Ex-Microsoft Ex-Etsy Cambridge MS Bioinformatics

CTO

Mike Castner

Nine years at Google across Safe Browsing, Fuchsia, Spanner, and the Android Privacy Sandbox. Built the MPAC GenAI engine at Pelidum. 58 internal peer awards. He's already shipped the kind of trust and safety architecture queer women deserve — the capability the category's cautionary tales lacked.

Ex-Google · 9 yrs Safe Browsing Privacy Sandbox Spanner Applied GenAI

Plus a backend engineer onboard, a design partner of record (Opportune Design Co.), and an active community-and-partnerships team running the 2026 activation calendar.

The Ask

Raising $2.5M pre-seed to build the trust layer before the demand cascade.

18+ months of runway. Ship the platform, convert the international pipeline, and earn the traction data that prices the seed round — with safety infrastructure that can absorb a Tea-scale surge without a Tea-scale failure. At a $17M post-money cap, founder dilution stays under 15%: disciplined terms, priced on a technical founder who built the product herself and a GTM calendar already contracted on two continents.

How we monetize: freemium subscription at the ~$15/mo category benchmark, the women-only in-app marketplace and brand partnerships, and enterprise insight dashboards. What this round buys: public launch, 100K+ registered members (≈1% of the incumbent's base), retention above category norms, and first revenue live on two of the four surfaces — the metrics that price the seed.

Use of funds

Where the $2.5M goes.

Engineering and ML hires to scale the platform. Trust and safety tooling at the level we built at Google. The activation calendar through WorldPride Amsterdam and the fall slate. Founder pay so the team stops running on a founder tax.

Engineering & ML team60%

Trust & safety + infrastructure18%

Pride + fall activation calendar8%

Founder & ops compensation10%

Legal, compliance, buffer4%

Round size$2.5M

InstrumentSAFE (post-money)

Valuation cap$17M

Implied dilution~14.7%

Runway18+ months

Use of proceedsTeam · Safety · Scale

Lead statusOpen

First closeQ4 2026

Final closeQ1 2027