Grindr spent $250 million to buy a PrEP provider called Freddie. Not a person named Freddie. A company. They named a telehealth company Freddie like it's a golden retriever that brings you pills instead of tennis balls.
The dating app now owns a healthcare business. This makes perfect sense if you've ever wondered what happens when a tech company runs out of ways to monetize loneliness and decides to monetize not dying instead. PurposeMed is the parent company. Freddie is the brand. The purpose is profit. The medicine is secondary.
Grindr calls this expansion into healthcare. The rest of us call it buying your customer base's pharmacy. Why advertise PrEP when you can just sell it directly? Cut out the middleman. The middleman being your user's doctor, privacy, and any remaining illusion that your app isn't tracking every aspect of your existence.
This is vertical integration for people who thought vertical integration was a yoga pose. First they know who you're meeting. Now they know what prescriptions you need after you meet them. Next quarter they'll acquire a urgent care clinic and close the loop entirely.
Some analyst will call this synergistic. That analyst owns three shares and thinks portfolio diversification means buying both Grindr and Tinder. He'll write a Seeking Alpha post about how this creates a moat. The moat is a f*cking telehealth app named Freddie.
The press release says they want to make HIV prevention more accessible. Noble. Also convenient that accessible means accessible through an app that already has your location, your photos, and your entire dating history. But sure. Accessibility. That's the angle.
$250 million buys a lot of access to people who were already accessing your platform for free.
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