Insiders at Grindr are discussing taking the company private after a stock slide forced its owners into a precarious personal financial position, people familiar with the matter said.
Raymond Zage and James Lu, who control a majority of the dating app, are in talks to secure debt financing from Fortress Investment Group to acquire Grindr, which has a market value of $2.4 billion, the people said. The fast-moving talks come after a unit of Temasek, which had made personal loans to at least one of the men secured by their holdings, seized some of the underlying shares last week and sold them, the people said.
Zage and Lu have discussed a buyout price of around $15 a share, some of the people said, cautioning that number could change. A deal at that price would value the company at around $3 billion.
Spokesmen for Grindr and Fortress declined to comment. A representative for Temasek, a sovereign-wealth fund in Singapore, wasn’t immediately available to comment. Grindr shares rose 7% on Semafor’s report.
Any deal would likely carry national-security implications. Grindr was originally owned by a Chinese firm, which sold it in 2020 after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States raised concerns about sensitive personal data — which could be used in blackmail attempts — being accessed by Beijing. Zage, a US expat who is now a Singaporean national, surpassed 50% ownership of Grindr just last month through stock buybacks. Lu is a Chinese-born US citizen, according to the South China Morning Post.
