Why I built NexSpark

A letter from Matthew Firth, founder & matchmaker

I didn't build NexSpark because I hate dating apps. I built it because the people around me were lonely, and it turns out they're far from alone. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared a national epidemic of loneliness and isolation, with a health toll that rivals smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Roughly half of American adults say they feel lonely. And the cruelest part: the most digitally connected generations are the loneliest of all.

We were handed more ways to connect than any humans in history, and we ended up further apart.

I've spent thirty years building software: e-commerce systems that handled millions of orders, enterprise platforms, AI and IoT infrastructure. I know how these products are designed, and what they're designed for. So I'll say the uncomfortable part plainly: a dating app's best customer is someone who never finds anyone. The moment you fall in love, you stop paying. That's not a conspiracy; it's incentives. In dating, retention means you're still single, and every design choice follows from there: the endless deck of cards, the intermittent rewards, the matches that go nowhere but keep you opening the app.

I watched people I care about pour years into that machine: smart, warm, genuinely available people getting more tired and more cynical every season. Not because there was anything wrong with them, but because they were playing a game whose house always wins.

NexSpark is my answer, built on one principle: we only get paid when two people choose each other. Not when you subscribe. Not when you swipe. When you both read why you fit, and you both say yes. No ads, no selling your data, no engagement games. If we don't make introductions worth saying yes to, we don't have a business, which is exactly the pressure a matchmaker should be under. People before metrics.

And here's the conviction underneath all of it: the same technology that has done so much to separate and isolate us can be turned around and used to bring us back together. AI didn't have to become a machine for harvesting attention and keeping us apart. Pointed the other way, it can do the patient, careful work of truly understanding two people and helping them actually find each other. Our AI weighs values, lifestyle, how you bond, and your dealbreakers across every verified member in a city, in both directions, more thoroughly than any human could. Then I review every introduction myself, because the algorithm finds the overlap in two lives, but my job is to ask whether you'd actually enjoy a rainy Tuesday together. If I wouldn't introduce you at my own dinner table, you won't be introduced here.

I couldn't wait around for the culture to fix its loneliness problem. I've come to believe that if you want the change, you have to become it. So we're starting in Atlanta, deliberately small. Every member is identity-verified before any introduction. Everyone stays anonymous until both people choose otherwise. And during our launch, all of it is free, because the first thing I want from you isn't your money. It's your second-date story.

If you're lonelier than you'd like to admit, or just tired of a game rigged against you: I built this for you.