Saath is being built by someone who is in it, for the people who would actually use it. Here is the longer answer to "who made this and why".
Saath is a South Asian dating app from Petalform LLC, launching city by city in Summer 2026. It is invite-only at the start. It is built for the diaspora, not for diversity as a marketing field. It has free community, language, ethnicity, and city filters, and it does not have a caste filter at any layer of the product or the database.
The name comes from the Hindi-Urdu word saath, which means together or with. The same word exists in Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati. More on the name here.
Most dating apps for the South Asian diaspora fall into one of two categories. They are generic global apps that bolt on cultural language as a quarterly marketing campaign. Or they are niche South Asian apps that treat culture as the product but quietly keep a caste filter in the database because removing it costs them a slice of revenue.
The first kind does not serve the diaspora. The second kind serves it badly. Both kinds tend to charge a premium tier for things like seeing who liked you and the block button.
Saath is built on the bet that there is room for a third kind: a serious, culturally fluent, intentionally paced South Asian dating app that treats the things people actually need (community filters, safety features) as the baseline and refuses the things they should not have to opt out of (caste filtering).
It is the app we wanted to use. There was not one.
Community, language, religion, sect, city, age, gender, and dating intention are how a South Asian person actually thinks about compatibility. They are the baseline of the product, not a revenue lever.
Not as a profile field. Not as a hidden ranking signal. Not as a premium tier. Enforced at the database, not just in the UI. The engineering explainer.
Block, report, hide, and unmatch are core, not premium. Free safety is the floor of the dating-app category.
Eight likes per day for free users, an intro bank that fills slowly, and a daily Spark pool for one intentional conversation. We are not optimizing for time-on-app.
The daily one-on-one conversation pool is a community feature, not a Plus entitlement. It will not be sold.
Each launch waits for real local density before going wider. Dating apps with no local network are bad dating apps.
Ankit Patel is the founder of Petalform LLC and the person writing the code. He is a software engineer and a member of the South Asian diaspora who got tired of dating apps that either treated culture as a marketing campaign or treated caste as a filter. Saath is his answer to that.
Petalform LLC is the parent company. SAATH is the subject of a pending U.S. trademark application (USPTO Serial 99843571, Class 045: online dating and social introduction services). Full filing details.
Saath is in active development. The web holding page is live. The mobile app is in private testing. The waitlist is open and we read every signup. The first cities go live in Summer 2026.
We are writing in the open about the decisions we are making, including the ones we know will lose us some users on principle. If any of this resonates, join the waitlist and tell us your city.
The first wave is invite-only, city by city, from the waitlist.
Apply to be a Saathi →