Tinder At Heart Of Ongoing Legal Battle In Toronto

Dating app Tinder is currently at the heart of an ongoing legal feud in Toronto, as two parties argue over their share in the incubator where Tinder was built.

The founders of VC fund Toronto’s Extreme Venture Partners had a stake in Xtreme Labs, which had a joint venture with IAC called Hatch Labs – the incubator out of which Tinder was born.

And in the suit, filed last November, the three founders of the VC fund have said they were “conspired against” to sell their part in Xtreme Labs, according to the Globe and Mail.

The claimants, Ravinder Sharma, Imran Bashir and Kenneth Teslia have filed to receive more than $200m in damages.

Court documents say that in 2012, the Extreme Venture Fund were given $10m for their stake in Xtreme Labs.

However Varma and Madra kept their shares, worth $8m, and went on to sell the shares and stake in Tinder for $55m.

The claimants say that the two founders conspired to conceal the existence of, and interest in, the dating app Tinder.

Varma and Madra however say that this is untrue, and the dating app hadn’t even built yet by the time the initial sale was agreed upon.

They say that Tinder was launched in August 2012, which was months after negotiations about the Xtreme Labs deal had ended.

The defendants and founders of Xtreme Labs – Amar Varma and Sundeep Madra – said the claim is an attempt to “rewrite history”.

Their statement of defence reads: “The Plaintiffs seek to re-write history because Tinder ultimately achieved commercial success.

“Its future success was unforeseen and unforeseeable, and it did not achieve success for years thereafter.”