For investors
The app pays. The students show up. The town gets busier.
Sarx is a campus matching app whose business model lives off the phone. Local establishments pay a monthly fee to be where a match goes tonight. Every account keeps a card on file. Sarx puts up the first dates to get a campus moving, and once it has momentum, using the app becomes a subscription both sides pay. Every night out that works puts money in a local till and a story on campus, and both bring in more.
Where the money comes from
- From the first night Local establishments A bar, a café, a restaurant pays a flat monthly fee to be one of the places a matched couple can be sent, with the table held. The fee is the same whether the app sends two couples that month or twenty.
- Launch phase The card Every account keeps a card on file. Through the launch programme — the first 300 dates on a campus — Sarx pays for the first date from the venue's own menu, capped at $200; whatever the night runs past that is settled by the venue with the account that booked. The programme is bounded: when those dates are used, it stops.
- Once it has momentum Subscription Using the app becomes a subscription, paid by both sides. By then the accounts, the cards and the habit are already in place, so switching it on is a setting, not a launch.
The launch programme is how a two-sided market is started. Pricing is the same for every account, and once there is momentum both sides pay the same subscription.
The model, in one loop
- Local establishments pay. A bar, a café, a restaurant pays a monthly fee to be one of the places a matched couple can be sent, with the table held.
- College students sign up and use the app. Verified by campus email, one campus at a time. Every account keeps a card on file. A match arrives with the evening already made, so using the app means going out, not scrolling.
- Funding paves the way to continued use. What comes in keeps the nights happening, and every one that works builds the app's reputation where it counts: on campus, by word of mouth.
- The local economy gets a boost, and that attracts more clientele. Venues see the customers and want in. Students see their friends going out and sign up. Around it goes.
How many are on each side
Both sides are countable, and the count is somebody else's. Five campuses open first, all in Georgia. What follows is published data, named at the foot of the section, with the parts that flatter us taken back out.
The students
| Campus | Enrolled | Undergraduates |
|---|---|---|
| Georgia Tech | 56,715 | 20,769 |
| Georgia State | 53,144 | 44,431 |
| Kennesaw State | 51,375 | 45,823 |
| University of Georgia | 43,887 | 32,684 |
| Emory | 16,511 | 8,341 |
| Five campuses | 221,632 | 152,048 |
Undergraduates is the honest column. Tech's other 35,687 are online master's students who never come to Atlanta, and 16,000 of Georgia State's are at Perimeter, out in the suburbs. Both gone, it is still 152,048 people, average age 19.8 to 22.4.
Three of the five are within five miles. Tech and Georgia State are 1.4 miles apart, Emory four and a half from both. Kennesaw is twenty miles out and Athens sixty, so each campus is its own market — which opening one at a time already assumed.
Half of them have already tried the category. 51% of under-thirties have used a dating app, 10% are using one now. The sharper figure: 55% of women think meeting someone from an app is unsafe, against 30% of men. A dating app is worth what its women think of it, and every rule in this one — the campus email, the staffed public room, the coordinates nobody receives — is written for whoever answered unsafe.
The venues
- 23,959 restaurant locations in Georgia
- $47.2B restaurant and foodservice sales in the state
- 505,600 jobs — the third largest private employer in Georgia
- 2.8% median income before tax at a full-service restaurant
The last one is the whole pitch. A full-service restaurant clears 2.8% before tax, and nine in ten restaurants nationally are small businesses. At that margin a discount is expensive and a dead Tuesday is worse, which is why the offer is neither: a flat monthly fee, and a party of two who have already decided to come, served at the venue's own margin.
And Sarx does not need 23,959 of them. It needs the ones a student can walk to from one campus — signed once, paying every month, whether the app sends them two couples or twenty — and then the same again at the next campus. The number that has to be true for this to work is small enough to write down.
Sources. Enrolment — University System of Georgia, Fall 2025 Semester Enrollment Report (December 2025 update), with undergraduate counts taken as the report's lower and upper level columns added together; Emory University, Facts and Figures. Restaurants — National Restaurant Association, Georgia state fact sheet (PDF), 2025 data, and the 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, over 900 restaurants, reported here. Dating — SSRS, The Public and Online Dating 2026: 2,012 US adults, January 2026, ±2.5 points. Distances are between campus centres. Each source opens in a new tab.
Why a dollar in comes back
- Capped Sarx's spend on a first date stops at $200, and the launch programme itself stops at 300 dates. Both the cost of a night and the total ever spent are bounded before the first dollar goes out.
- Offset The venues pay every month to be where the nights happen, whether or not a given night happens. That revenue does not rise and fall with volume, which makes it the line the business is built on.
- Recurring A couple that went out is two accounts with a card on file and a reason to come back. The launch dates run out; the venues keep paying monthly and the subscription switches on. What the programme buys is a base that still pays after it stops.
- Paced It happens one campus at a time. The spend is paced by design, and each campus that talks about it fills faster than the one before.
Terms
Terms are shared directly, not published. The form at the foot of this page reaches the founder with Investing already selected; say a little about yourself and the terms come back by reply.
Nothing on this page is an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security. Any investment would be made only through definitive documents, and only by investors who qualify.
Where it shows in the product
- The match screen "Tonight, on us" — the model at the moment it happens.
- The walk-through Six steps, from the campus email to the bill, with the phone live.
- Every screen The app in one row, in day and in night.
Where things stand
- The waitlist Open now. A campus stays shut until enough of it has signed up.
- First campuses Go live this fall, one at a time.