HowAboutWe raises $4.2M to help you fall and stay in love

HowAboutWe has raised $4.2 million to keep the flames of love alive.

An SEC filing reveals that HowAboutWe’s parent company, ThisLife Inc., has closed $4.2 million of a $5 million round.

HowAboutWe is trying to change the experience of online dating to make it more appealing to the current generation of daters. This “modern love company” seeks to connect people offline over shared interests and activities.

“Almost all existing online dating sites are oriented towards keeping people online – messaging endlessly and browsing infinite lists of repetition profiles,” founders Aaron Schildkrout and Brian Schechter told VentureBeat. “Online dating as a business has a terrible churn problem because these companies lose their most successful customers. We’ve become the first dating site to prove a meaningful, on-brand service for our happiest members. In doing so, we became the first dating site that doesn’t want our users to fail.”

People post specific date ideas to the site, starting with “How about we … .” Other members of the community browse through date ideas, photos, and profiles to find intriguing matches, and then they make a date in the real world.

The company is now adding 100,000 users a month, and in January 2013 it launched a Couples product, meant for people who are already dating but still looking for interesting activities. Couples members get access to experiences at discounted prices, ranging from tours of Kink.com’s headquarters to a classy wine tasting.

The founders said married couples spend billions of dollars a year on dates and that adding this vertical “massively expands” the size of the addressable market.

With this financing, HowAboutWe intends to scale by adding new products and services, and expanding into new markets. Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and ff Venture Capital led this B-2 round of financing. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $22 million. Khosla Ventures led its 2011 Series B.

HowAboutWe was founded in New York in 2009 and launched in April 2010. It competes with dating sites like OKCupid, e-harmony, and Match.com (which launched its experience-based Stir product a year ago), as well as daily deals sites like Groupon and Living Social.