Anti-superficial relationship app S’More was chosen to feature in a special Pride Month commercial for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud computing platforms and application programming interfaces.
Founder and CEO Adam Cohen Aslatei took part in an interview in which he spoke about the history of the brand, the benefits of having a diverse founding team and how AWS works to protect its users.
To celebrate Pride Month, Amazon wanted to highlight its relationship with S’More and bring awareness to the lack of support and equal opportunities LGBTQ innovators receive. Just 1% of venture capital funding goes to the LGBTQ community, but oftentimes these investments make oversized returns.
Cohen Aslatei explained in the commercial: “I feel extremely fortunate that S’More was benefiting from this 1%, but it also shows me that we need to do a lot better.
“The LGBTQ experience is one where we do face adversity and everyone faces it in a different way, but it builds thick skin and it makes you a fighter and it makes you determined. When you put someone in a leadership position that knows how it feels to be the underdog, that person is going to fight harder, they’re going to succeed and we need to invest in those areas.”
As a company with “massive growth potential”, S’More is part of the ‘Activate’ program and has free access to some of the most advanced technology solutions.
It has received “tens of thousands of dollars” of developer resources and technology. This includes ‘Rekognition’, a product that uses machine learning to instantly modify and verify content, as well as blocking bad actors.
S’More is one of a handful of dating apps to use the Rekognition technology, which it claims makes the platform “100% catfish free”.
The app officially went live in San Francisco last Thursday, the seventh launch city in the US. San Francisco has the largest population of LGBTQ residents in the country and the first 1,000 new sign ups received a free one-week premium membership.
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