This techie helps millennials find the right life partner using algorithms

Pawan Gupta co-founder, Betterhalf.ai, is on a mission to become the world's largest AI-powered partner prediction engine and help 200 million professionals find their soul mates

When entrepreneur Pawan Gupta, 31, decided to get married, he found it a challenge to find a compatible partner who could fit in with his start-up lifestyle. Despite having a management degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and having worked with top companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and WeChat, Gupta’s main hurdle was that he didn’t have a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. kind of job and had to work on weekends sometimes as well. 

“Also, I was looking for a soft-spoken person. I am not good at handling aggressive behaviour or anger. I believe any issue can be handled politely,” says Gupta, who besides having passion for his work, also likes to cook, run, do household chores and listen to Bollywood songs from the 1990s. 

Gupta sought the help of technology provided by his own start-up, Betterhalf.ai, which used algorithms to find him a compatible partner who matched his personality. “My fiance was also looking for a similar kind of person as she is passionate about her work,” said Gupta. “Our personality matched in a great way, whether it's our outlook towards life, relationship goals, sharing household chores as well as supporting each other’s career.”

Despite the advancement in technology, the partner search industry still faces issues that have persisted for thousands of years. People eligible to marry have to rely on parents, relatives, community as well as online matrimony services to help them find the partner. Gupta, who co-founded Betterhalf.ai in 2016 along with Rahul Namdev, 31, aims to disrupt the traditional matchmaking space. Namdev, incidentally, also holds a Master’s degree in computer science from MIT. Betterhalf.ai is going beyond the basic attributes like age, location, caste and dwells into interpersonal, intellectual and social connect.

Unlike dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, Betterhalf is a marriage platform that helps working professionals in the 27-40 age group make their search for a partner timely and delightful through an artificial intelligence-powered partner prediction engine. Betterhalf’s AI engine starts learning about a user’s personality as soon as he or she starts the on-boarding process.

“We are approaching this large human problem of matchmaking and companionship using technology and not marketing,” says Gupta. The other problem is that people have to scan and search for thousands of profiles and spend a lot of time on that leading to ‘search fatigue.’ “We want to cut that down so that you can spend more time on interactions,” says Gupta, who is also an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology. 

Betterhalf uses AI across stages. It collates users’ different personality dimensions such as emotional, social, intellectual, physical and relationship and assigns values to them by asking a series of questions. While a user is interacting with the product, the engine gathers his or her behavioural information, such as time spent on different sections of their matches’ profile. For example, if out of 10 matches, the user spends more time on five profiles who like to travel, the system learns that the user is interested in a partner who likes travelling. It has also gamified the platform to understand user personality. Asking questions over a period of time also helps the platform capture information on different states of mind and evaluate the exact personality of a user. After the interaction, the platform takes timely private feedback about a user from the matches. This includes authenticity of the profile, intent to marry, compatibility, likes or dislikes. The final step involves rectifying any outlier data by using the machine-learning algorithm. 

Betterhalf said its ‘compatibility estimation’ and ‘matching formulae’, derived from research work going on at Cambridge University, utilises this personality traits to predict best compatible matches for users. It processes basic partner preferences such as age range, height, caste, religion, location, education and salary to filter and rank those matches. Betterhalf also leverages AI based on relationship data of 100,000 married people worldwide.

“Artificial Intelligence has changed many important areas of our lives, from healthcare to national security. It is now revolutionising the way in which we find our soul mates and perhaps the most consequential of the decisions we have to make in our lifetimes,” says Michal Kosinski, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford University (Graduate School of Business). “With the help of Betterhalf.ai, people will make better-informed choices, leading to happier partners, healthier and more stable families,” says Kosinski, who is an advisor to the company.

Betterhalf is used by 100,000 users today from 20,000 unique companies. About 80 per cent of the users are from eight metropolitan cities in India. More than 10,000 people are matched every month by the firm. The company said it provides a safe and secure platform for women, keeping their personal information under lock and key. Also, users can connect with a premium network of professionals through a rigorous verification process. 

Betterhalf has attracted funding from top investors such as Shailesh Rao, former managing director of Google India and partner of TPG Capital, Vinay Subramanian, partner at Stakeboat Capital, and Rehan A Khan, an investor at FirstPenguin Capital. The firm expects to have a million users in the next 12 months.

“With AI becoming mainstream in various disciplines, partner prediction is the next bastion where it will play a massive role,” says Subramanian of Stakeboat Capital. “Having witnessed Betterhalf over the past 18 months, I'm amazed at how far they have come in terms of their technology, ML algorithms and product development with customer growth scaling exponentially month after month,” he adds.

Gupta of Betterhalf says his firm aims to become the world's largest AI- and ML-powered partner prediction engine and aid 200 million qualified professionals in the world to find their compatible partners. “We're like Google Maps, we will show you the path, traffic information and tell you this is a better route. But we won’t tell you this is the only way, you always have more options,” he adds.