Tinder has made its first ever business match, acquiring ephemeral messaging app Tappy for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is aimed at helping the dating app add some depth to its hugely popular matchmaking services. Although users love Tinder's swipe-based mechanics (the company recently hit the 5 billion match mark — swift growth from 1 billion matches in March last year), Tinder CEO and co-founder Sean Rad says that the difficulty is improving the quality of matches. Ironically it seems that Tappy — an app which forces users to start every interaction with a photo and deletes conversations every 24 hours — could be the answer.

"We want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place."

"We’re very good at connecting people, but there’s this ‘what happens after that?’ moment that we want to improve," Rad told TechCrunch. "We not only want to get better at the way we use criteria to connect people, but we want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place. The Tappy team will help us tackle both fronts, the pre-match experience of creating that first connection and the post-match experience of communicating with that person."

It's likely that Tappy’s expertise will be used to expand Tinder Moments, an update to the dating app released last June that lets users broadcast photos to matches. Using Moments, users can draw on their photos and add captions and filters — all in the hope that an extra flash of social media peacocking will attract the right date. Tappy's engineers could expand this functionality (perhaps adding direct photo messaging) and maybe even help Tinder take its relationship with its users up a level — from dating app to social media messenger.