Chinese gaming company Kunlun Group now owns 100% of Grindr after buying remaining stake from founder and CEO Joel Simkhai, who has now left the company
Alejandra Reyes-Velarde / Los Angeles Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a deal that began when Beijing Kunlun Tech bought a 60% stake in Grindr at a $155M valuation in January 2016, with the option structure implied by today's buyout of Joel Simkhai's remaining shares. Full Chinese ownership of an app holding intimate data on millions of US users is what put Grindr on Washington's radar.
The arc that followed confirms why this moment matters: a US government panel raised concerns about Kunlun's ownership, Kunlun said it was required under an agreement with US officials to sell by June 2020, and it eventually agreed to a ~$608M sale to investor consortium San Vicente Acquisition.
First-order effects
- Joel Simkhai is fully out — the founder who built Grindr has no equity and no executive role, leaving Kunlun Group with sole control of the app, its codebase, and its user data.
- Grindr loses its American-founder face at exactly the point its ownership becomes entirely Chinese, removing the one figure who could vouch for the company domestically.
Second-order effects
- The complete buyout is what drew the US government panel's scrutiny, forcing Kunlun onto the path of seeking buyers rather than integrating Grindr into its portfolio — a reversal of the acquisition strategy announced here.
- Buyers vetted for the forced sale faced added scrutiny themselves, with reporting that the approved investor group had financial and personal links back to Kunlun — meaning the divestiture process itself became contested territory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, apps holding sensitive personal data become assets whose foreign ownership can be unwound by government order regardless of how the stake was acquired — turning CFIUS-style review into a structural risk priced into any cross-border media or social-app deal.
- Divestitures ordered on security grounds raise a systemic question about effectiveness: when approved buyers retain ties to the original owner, control may change hands on paper more than in practice.
The trend: US national-security review of foreign ownership is reshaping who can hold stakes in apps that aggregate Americans' sensitive personal data, even retroactively after a completed acquisition.