Plenty of Fish is owned by Match Group (the United States, NASDAQ: MTCH), which acquired the brand on 28 October 2015 for $575 million.[1][2] Plenty of Fish was founded in 2003 in Vancouver and was independent until 2015.
Evidence: Match Group, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K filed 2026-02-26, SEC EDGAR, 26 February 2026. Verified from filings; last checked .
Plenty of Fish was built and run almost single-handedly by one Vancouver developer, who kept it free and sold advertising while competitors charged subscriptions. Match Group acquired it in 2015 for $575 million in cash. Its founder ran it for years with almost no staff while it served millions of users, and it remains positioned as the free alternative within a portfolio built largely on subscriptions.
A plain count of the times the name appears in the text of each annual report, not counting the start of a sentence. A brand that an owner writes about more is usually one it treats as central. The brand is named more often than it was three years earlier.
Controlling ownership as of . Brands grouped under the entity that owns them; large groups are collapsed.
Open the full Match Group ownership tree →
See the full Match Group brand portfolio (6) →
Match Group controls 6 brands on Brandtree, 6 of them in internet & digital.
The 20 brands in dating apps on Brandtree belong to 6 owners. The largest is ParshipMeet, with 8; Match Group has 6.
| Brand | Owner | Owner based in |
|---|---|---|
| eharmony | ParshipMeet | 🇩🇪 Germany |
| Badoo | Bumble | 🇺🇸 United States |
| happn | Hello Group | 🇨🇳 China |
| Grindr | Grindr Inc. | 🇺🇸 United States |
| VK Dating | VK | 🇷🇺 Russia |
| ElitePartner | ParshipMeet | 🇩🇪 Germany |
| GROWLr | ParshipMeet | 🇩🇪 Germany |
| LOVOO | ParshipMeet | 🇩🇪 Germany |
Match Group is a publicly listed company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, United States, founded in 1995. Brandtree records 6 brands under its control, and it is listed as NASDAQ: MTCH.
Match Group owns most of the large dating apps in the western world, which means the apps people switch between when one is not working generally belong to the same company. It was built inside IAC and fully separated from it in 2020.
Brandtree records a controlling owner for 178 brands that began in Canada. 45 of them (25%) are now controlled by a company headquartered in another country, Plenty of Fish among them.
Match Group acquired Plenty of Fish for $575 million in cash. The site had been built and run almost single-handedly by one Vancouver developer, who kept it free and sold advertising while the company that bought it charged subscriptions.
The parent company of Plenty of Fish is Match Group, a publicly listed company headquartered in the United States.
Plenty of Fish originated in Canada in 2003, but it is owned today by Match Group, which is headquartered in the United States. So Plenty of Fish is a Canadian-origin brand under American ownership.
Match Group completed its acquisition of Plenty of Fish on 28 October 2015, after announcing the deal on 14 July 2015. The deal was valued at $575 million.
Plenty of Fish was an independent company from its founding in 2003 in Vancouver until Match Group acquired it in 2015.
Yes. As of 16 September 2026, Plenty of Fish is still owned by Match Group. The ownership record was last checked against primary sources on that date.
Last verified . Every ownership fact above is backed by one of these primary documents. Numbers in brackets in the text refer to this list.
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