Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Have 2 Sikh Entrepreneurs Created The Next Big Jewish Dating App?

Two Indian Americans are behind the new matchmaking service, Shalom. And they say its matching algorithms are as smart as its users

(JTA) — At first glance, K.J. Dhaliwal and Sukhmeet Toor may be unlikely candidates to create the latest Jewish-themed dating app. After all, both men are Sikhs. And among the nine other members of their San Francisco-based team, there are exactly zero Jews on staff.

The pair are behind Dil Mil, described as a “Tinder alternative” for the South Asian community. Since Dhaliwal, 27, and Toor, 33, founded the app in 2015, they claim it has made more than 5 million matches — leading to about one marriage every day.

It’s only logical that Dhaliwal and Toor, two Indian Americans, wanted to build upon their success, and they launched Shalom on Wednesday. But why start with a dating app for the Jewish community?

“The reason we started with the Jewish community was we saw a lot of similarities in terms of the values around community, the values around family, the values around marriage,” Dhaliwal told JTA. “It’s a very tight-knit, high-affinity community, just like the South Asian community.”

In addition, Jews and South Asians both tend to be more highly educated and of a higher socioeconomic status than the average American, said Dhaliwal, a self-described “artificial intelligence/machine learning enthusiast.”

The similarities led the founders to conclude that the technology that had been successful in the South Asian community would also work for single Jews.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.