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The founder of a sex party planner that is part-owned by the UK government through a pandemic-era start-up fund has vowed it will be a “pin-up” for the scheme and turn a profit for the British taxpayer thanks to its pivot towards a new dating app.
Killing Kittens in April rebranded its main business as WeAreX to coincide with the launch of an app of the same name that offers “social dating for sex positive people” as well as tickets to adult events. That followed a move late last year to carve its sex party business out as a wholly owned subsidiary.
The rejig of its corporate structure to focus on a new dating app was aimed at smoothing a profitable exit for investors including the UK government, which holds a 1.5 per cent stake in the company through its Future Fund. The scheme, which launched in April 2020, has faced criticism for ill-fated investments in start-ups.
Emma Sayle, WeAreX’s co-founder who started Killing Kittens in 2005, said splitting the businesses would ease a sale of the dating app to a larger rival within the next three to five years and help the government turn a profit on its £170,000 loan to the company, which was converted into equity last year.
“We’re the pin-up for the Future Fund and how it should be done,” said Sayle. She pointed to Match Group, which owns legacy dating platforms including Match.com and Plenty of Fish, as a potential buyer. Match has retained market dominance by buying up younger apps including Tinder, Hinge and The League.
The WeAreX app has gained 47,000 active monthly users since launch, of which about a third pay for a £24.99 monthly or £119.99 annual subscription, contributing to revenues over the past year of roughly £1mn. Killing Kittens’ events separately generated roughly £700,000 in revenues over the same period.
“The online side is very easy to see who would buy it,” said Sayle. “When you had it all lumped into one business and you’re talking about . . . mergers and acquisitions or exiting . . . the Killing Kittens party side of it is a harder sell.”
On the whole, the 1,191 promising tech and early-stage businesses to which the state-backed British Business Bank advanced £1.1bn of loans have struggled. As of the end of September, 146 businesses backed by the fund had been declared insolvent, losing the government £138mn. The government has generated £48mn from 55 corporate exits.
“As venture capital is long-term term investment, it is far too early to give an indication of the overall Future Fund portfolio performance,” the British Business Bank said.
Hadleigh Bolt, WeAreX’s chief operating officer, said the move into online dating offered the possibility of “more explosive growth, more avenues to enter into new markets and more routes to exit”, which would “ultimately make more money for the UK government”.
Sayle said WeAreX had a “niche which the bigger dating apps don’t have”. Unlike some bigger rivals, it only allows verified profiles as well as offering chat rooms where users can discuss sexual fetishes. It is also developing an ad platform for adult brands that counts sex toy company Lelo among its clients, and runs an e-ticketing platform for other adult events, which Sayle billed as the “Ticketmaster or Eventbrite for the sex-positive world”.
Dating apps have increasingly sought to appeal to a broader audience beyond heterosexual monogamous relationships. London-based Feeld has pitched itself as a sex-positive platform for all sexual orientations, while Hinge and Tinder recently rolled out features for users to seek non-monogamous matches.
WeAreX is working on an equity raise of at least £250,000 from retail investors that would value the business at £15mn, up from £14.5mn when the government took its 1.5 per cent stake last year. WeAreX is also targeting an up to £5mn series A funding round in 2025, as it builds towards a fivefold rise in group revenues to £9mn by the end of 2026, according to an investor document seen by the Financial Times.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
