Lavendr, the STRV-backed gay dating and social networking app that spun off into its own company earlier this year, has rebranded to Surge. The change comes after the development team spent months gathering feedback - both online and off - from the growing community of 300,000 loyal monthly users.
“Long-time members of the Surge community really deserve the credit here,” says STRV CTO Martin Stava, who is heading the Surge development team. “They wanted a name that conveys action and excitement. And we decided to take their advice.”
Over the next several weeks, the Surge team will be unveiling a number of changes from its logo and color scheme to online indicators and better filtering.
“Surge came out of STRV Labs last summer. And after the first few months, its user base had grown exponentially on the U.S. market. We are aiming to hit 1 million monthly users by next year and are working to expand our European community,” says Martin. “We want to make Surge the leading gay dating and social networking app on the global market.”
Surge is currently the fastest-growing gay dating app on the U.S. market and the most searched gay dating app on the Apple App Store. The team is now turning its attention to the U.K., Spain and France.
Martin is joined by STRV's long-time Android engineer Radek Sevcik, who originally came up with the concept, as well as iOS engineers Jakub Vodak, Luca D’Alberti and Allan Barbato and Jan Ther on backend. Tomas Vranek handling the UX/UI design, while Berenika Alexandre is overseeing Surge's growth from San Francisco.
Surge is the second STRV-developed app to branch out on its own in less than a year. The first, Ordr, is thriving on the Prague market. It is the city's go-to food delivery service.
