New Friend-Finding Service for Women in Silicon Valley

An employee at an AI dating startup has revealed a new service aimed at helping “ambitious” women in Silicon Valley connect with each other.

Elsa Cai, who works as a creative director at Ditto, shared on X that her move to San Francisco turned her world into one focused entirely on work—mostly discussing business with agents and spending significant amounts of time with her engineering team.

To meet more women in the predominantly male tech environment, Cai created Bay Area Bestie, a platform intended to connect users with a new platonic friend each week.

“Bay Area Bestie: a way for young, ambitious girls in the bay to find each other,” she noted. “For the girlies who want to build big things and have friends to do life with.”

Cai’s announcement was accompanied by a photo of her with a member of her college sorority.

According to Ditto’s site, the service is open to all adults, not just women. To use the AI-powered matching service, users need a work or school email for identity verification and can specify what kind of person they wish to meet. Matches are provided on Wednesdays.

The entire service is free, as stated on the website.

Allen Wang, a co-founder at Ditto, mentioned that there were already over 250 sign-ups for Bay Area Besties within ten hours of the announcement.

Cai also tied the launch to a discussion about what has been termed the “hot girl bubble” in San Francisco, where attractive women are supposedly being drawn to the city by companies benefitting from the AI boom, which, of course, hire them to attract investors and clients.

A previous report highlighted the trend of Chinese and Chinese-American women relocating to Silicon Valley in hopes of finding partners involved in AI.

In a context where dating dynamics in San Francisco have become a hot topic, a startup employee recently went viral for outlining her extensive dating criteria.

Ditto, created by two UC Berkeley dropouts for college students, appears to be capitalizing on the dating challenges faced by tech workers, claiming to have facilitated over 80,000 dates with a 67% success rate.