A few years ago, as we sipped overpriced glasses of tempranillo at a Brooklyn bar constructed to look like an abandoned cabin, a friend told me that after a recent, harrowing breakup, she had decided to dip her toes back into the dating pool. However, she was no longer interested in the kind of monogamy that could tear your life into two devastated halves. Instead, she had found intimacy, understanding, and excellent sex on an app called Feeld.
In some ways, Feeld could be placed in the same category as the cascade of dating apps that have emerged to serve various romantic and sexual needs over the past decade: Hinge, Grindr, The League, Raya. The list, as anyone who has spent a Friday night swiping and agonizing over their “about me” bio knows, goes on.
But most of these apps reinscribe dating norms that existed long before the internet. Hinge, the “app meant to be deleted,” targets singles in their 20s and 30s seeking long term (usually monogamous) commitment. Grindr replicates the hook-up culture that has long been a centerpiece of urban gay life. The League and Raya are predicated on the uncomfortable fact that dating is often an outgrowth of capitalism—rife with hierarchies rooted in wealth, access, and fame.
In contrast, by embracing concepts first put forth in books like 1997’s The Ethical Slut, Feeld has grown alongside—and contributed to—a widespread rethinking of relationships, sexuality, and identity. When users log onto the app, they are offered a huge menu of identifications to choose from. While most apps only offer labels like “queer,” “heterosexual,” or “bi,” Feeld offers “androgynosexual,” “bi-curious,” “gynesexual,” and many, many more. That also includes numerous ways to label the type of relationships you're open to, from various threesome arrangements to simply watching.
While non-traditional relationship dynamics and underground sexual cultures have always thrived—particularly within queer communities, which have long been forged in steamy bath houses, sticky dive bars, and overcrowded apartment parties—Feeld was founded on the simple idea that such spaces and set-ups should be less stigmatized and easier to access. That ultimately led to another proposition: that a dating app can do more than connect us with other people; it can help us connect with our own pleasure, agency, and even power.
This belief came from personal experience. Feeld’s current CEO, Ana Kirova, met her partner Dimo Trifonov, the company’s founder, at a party when she was 21. The couple fell for each other, but a few months later, Kirova began to have equally-powerful romantic feelings for a woman, she recalls. Kirova was scared that the crush would spell disaster for her relationship with Trifonov and decided not to tell him. Soon, though, the feelings became too overwhelming to bear. In a letter she never planned to send, Kirova laid out her feelings, including how conflicted she felt about falling in love with two people at the same time. It was a burst of internal honesty that would go on to transform their relationship in more ways than she could have predicted.
Eventually, she decided to tell Trifonov, who shared that he, too, had often felt conflicted about romantic norms like monogamy. They had both grown up in Bulgaria at a time when conservative notions of sex and relationships prevailed. Trifonov agreed that those expectations felt limiting to bring into their relationship. Before long, they were exploring their sexuality, both as a couple and apart.
But the duo, who were living in London at the time, struggled to find acceptance in other areas of their life, including online. No other apps allowed them to date as a couple, leading Trifonov to create 3nder in 2014, which rebranded as Feeld in 2016. At the time, he had been working on another app called “Pokke,” which allowed like-minded people to meet when they first arrived in new cities. (Today, Feeld remains most downloaded in major urban areas like New York City and Berlin).
Kirova has been involved in the app since those early days. She officially joined the company in 2016 and has since been involved in almost every capacity, from operations to product development. In a market as saturated as dating apps, she has helped Feeld transition from an app known for facilitating threesomes into something larger — a space where people searching for connection beyond heterosexuality and monogamy might find each other, and perhaps even learn something new about themselves in the process.
Under Kirova’s leadership, Feeld launched a rebrand late last year that frames the app primarily as a tool for self discovery through exploration and connection. In addition to backend engineering changes, this included a number of splashy design and marketing updates, from partnering with the actress Tommy Dorfman on a new brand voiceover to expanded in-person “Feeld socials.” One event even included the Real Housewives of New York breakout star Brynn Whitfield, who may or may not be in love with Jenna Lyons.
When we speak on a cloudy day in late January, Kirova says that this commitment to transformation—both on the app and in real life—is what animates her work. “There isn’t an endgame. There isn’t a destination,” she says. Instead, her goal is to create a platform where people can experience their own multiplicities without judgment or fear. In some ways, she wants Feeld to mirror her own experience of sexual liberation.
Kirova, 31, says that as a child growing up in Bulgaria, queerness “was not something you talked about.” Later, when she watched the British television show Skins, a portal opened. “It just blew my mind,” she says. There was a “total lust for life,” that allowed her to understand her sexuality as a force that could break social taboos and empower her to explore the world in radical new ways.
Kirova is the one of a few queer woman to lead a major dating app, and her personal sensitivity and vision is inextricably bound to Feeld’s development. (The CEO’s of Hinge, Grindr, and The League are all cisgender men, which is perhaps one explanation for the often-abysmal experience for many queer and trans people on The Apps).
She’s part of a handful of post-Girl Boss era queer tech Presidents and CEO’s, including the astrologer Chani Nicholas, who insist that deep responsiveness to your community is not only morally right—it’s good business. In one instance, Kirova says she read a note from a trans Feeld user who said she didn’t feel like her identities were fully reflected on the app. Kirova says the letter is what inspired her to expand the app’s menu of descriptions for gender and sexuality. They also added the ability for users to change these descriptors as often as they want to.
This investment in the queer community also has a practical dimension. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, LGBTQ Americans are twice as likely to use a dating app as their straight peers, likely because of the hostility they may experience in traditional dating environments, like bars. By creating a space intended to make people feel seen in the fullness of their identities, Feeld is attracting a plethora of new users, Kirova says. According to the company, trans membership has grown by 70% in the past year alone.
More people than ever seem to be experimenting with romantic formulations outside of monogamy, partly because of a burst of media attention everywhere from Netflix’s Sense8 to HGTV’s House Hunters. (Kirova says one of Feeld’s fastest growing audiences is women between the ages of 50 and 60, for instance). With divorce rates in the United States hovering at 50%, it seems we are all looking for new ways to experience partnership.
Although only so much personal liberation can be found on an app, Kirova hopes Feeld can jumpstart that journey for people. The process of creating the app has certainly done that for her.
“The only thing that’s constant is change,” she says. “I want to give people the space to be themselves, even if that changes overnight.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.