WUCupid, created by sophomore Ben Kras, is WashU’s newest dating platform. (Courtesy of WUCupid)

If you’re a hopeless romantic and naive first-year like me, you probably expected to arrive at college, meet a nice guy in your College Writing seminar, and live happily ever after. Spoiler alert: the reality of finding love in college is quite different from what romantic comedies portrayed it to be. Luckily, there’s a new dating platform in town that aims to make dating at WashU a whole lot easier: WUCupid.  

Self-described by founder and sophomore Ben Kras as “WashU’s newest, best, most efficient dating platform,” WUCupid is an online dating program built exclusively for WashU students. WUCupid users have a month and six days to fill out a 38-question compatibility survey. After the survey period ends, there will be a three-day processing period where all responses are analyzed and matches are generated by a matchmaking algorithm Kras created.  

The idea for WUCupid first came to Kras when he was brainstorming for his final project in Rapid Prototype Development and Creative Programming, a class that he took in spring 2025. Kras thought that creating a “Tinder for WashU” could fix a significant issue he and his friends ran into during their first year on campus.

“The biggest problem people have with dating at WashU is that it’s difficult to meet people outside of your circle in a way that’s intended to lead to [a] romantic connection,” Kras said. “[WUCupid] is meant for people who are looking for serious romantic relationships.”

While there have been other WashU-specific dating platforms in previous years, Kras believes that WUCupid provides more flexibility and inclusion than prior sites. The two former platforms that Kras mentioned, Datamatch and Marriage Pact, shared a similar survey format to WUCupid.

“[Other platforms] ran on a similar format, but the big problem I had with them is that they’re very exclusive,” Kras said. “Marriage Pact ran early in September, and it only ran once a year … so if you missed out that September window, that was it, and especially for freshmen who were still getting used to the chaos of moving into college and all that, it was something that a lot of people didn’t have time to realize was a thing … Datamatch [had] the same kind of issue, except that it runs on Valentine’s Day.”

After coming up with the initial idea, Kras got to coding. The survey is categorized into two types of preferences: soft preferences and hard preferences. Hard preferences, Kras explained, are things like sexual orientation, political views, and religion, which will be considered before any of the soft preferences are matched to ensure that people are paired with the most compatible partners. In contrast, hard preferences include hobbies and interests. After preferences are taken care of, Kras analyzes the data vectors using cosine similarity.  

Luckily, Kras didn’t have to start from scratch when creating this algorithm. It turns out he isn’t the only Campus Cupid in the family.

“I’ve had a lot of help … and mentoring from my brother,” Kras said. “My brother ran his own general public dating app during the pandemic … I obtained a lot of valuable data and information and mentoring from him throughout this process.”

Kras’s brother’s platform, Mixmosa, had many similar goals to WUCupid, like the establishment of “genuine connections instead of random hookups,” according to Kras. Mixmosa operated in Austin, where Kras’ brother lived at the time.  

Kras has already been getting feedback on his platform, both through messages on WUCupid’s Instagram, verbal feedback, emails through WUCupid’s website, and comments on the anonymous social media platform Sidechat. While there has been a lot of positive feedback, some have commented that the questions are “too repetitive or generic.” Others take issue with the fact that pictures of the users are not included in the matchmaking process. 

“Obviously, compatibility is a massive part of determining probability of success in a relationship, but there also does have to be some kind of physical attractiveness involved as well, and that is something I’m looking into doing in the future,” Kras said. “I’m not sure if that’ll happen within this cycle or even the next, because that is something that’s going to take a little bit of time to implement, but I’m pretty sure that that’s a good idea for the future.”

WUCupid is still in its very early stages. The first matches have yet to come out, which means that over 500 students who have taken the survey aren’t able to determine the levels of WUCupid’s legitimacy as a dating service. However, to Kras, success is relative; his goal is to help people, even if it is just a few.

“I’ve kind of joked to my friends that I think my idea of success in the long term is if I get a message on Instagram or whatever in a few months being like, ‘Hey, I met my girlfriend,’ or, ‘I met my boyfriend or my partner on this,’” Kras said. “If I get one message like that, I’ve done it. I’ve won.”