The perfect match: relationship app Paired joins the Privacy Compliance Hub

It can be hard to ask for help sometimes. Couples spent more time together than ever before over the past couple of years, forced to work remotely and homeschool with little respite. Despite arguing more than ever before, a recent YouGov survey found six in 10 UK adults in a relationship say they don’t speak to anyone for relationship advice and just 1% of people would seek couples therapy or counselling for problems in their relationship. 

It was a lack of help to prevent problems from arising in the first place that led former management consultant Kevin Shanahan to co-found Paired in 2020. The mobile app for couples prompts daily conversations with fun questions and quizzes, and encourages partners to take small positive steps to improve their relationship with audio tips from experts. “We know that people are relying on technology to find love … I believe we’ll soon see a shift towards people using technology to help them stay in love too,” Shanahan, who is now Paired’s CEO, says. 

Since its launch two years ago, Paired has grown from around 1,000 monthly active users to more than 500,000 across the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The team has secured more than £3m in funding from investors including Taavet Hinrikus (a former co-founder of TransferWise) and the founders of Runtastic, which was sold to Adidas. Paired was named Apple App of the Day in November 2021. 

Of course, data is key to this startup’s success, as is the trust users have in the platform to keep some of their most intimate information confidential. “We take privacy and security very seriously,” Shanahan has said in an early interview about the app’s launch. That’s why the co-founders have made the decision to join the Privacy Compliance Hub. 

“The Privacy Compliance Hub takes a distributed approach to privacy that really resonates with us. It helps all members of the Paired team to understand, act on, and take ownership for privacy rather than thinking of it as someone else’s responsibility.  This enables us to identify and act on privacy topics more quickly and with better results.”

Kevin Shanahan – CEO, Paired

“It’s an exciting time for Paired. With such an impressive rate of growth, they wanted to put a more formal structure in place to deal with privacy and to publicly demonstrate their commitment to data protection. We’re the perfect match and are looking forward to working together.”

Nigel Jones – Co-founder, Privacy Compliance Hub