PortalsOS

Despite Grindr's controversial nature, the app was an incredible business opportunity due to its profitability and strong market position. The company was growing rapidly, and users loved the product.

We bought Grindr for about $600 million, which was under market value due to a lack of competition in the process. The company was doing less than $50 million in EBITDA at the time, translating to a 12-13x EBITDA multiple, while public companies were trading at around 20x.

Jeff Bonforte reflects on the success of Grindr: 'We took Grindr from $100 million of revenue to $200 million in two and a half years by upgrading talent, tech, and launching new products. Applying the Tinder playbook was key to our strategy.'

When Grindr was up for sale, many typical buyers were deterred due to the app's association with gay dating, revealing latent homophobia in the investment process. This allowed non-traditional private equity firms to purchase the company.

When we took Grindr public for $2 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, we created a 9x return on the $200 million of equity, generating about $1.6 billion in value.