Women Are Crowdsourcing Dating Safety. This Atlanta Founder Built an App to Make It Official.

We watch Netflix series based on friend recommendations. We look at a bunch of product reviews before adding any item to an online shopping cart. We book hotels, hire contractors, and pick restaurants based on ratings left by strangers.

“Every decision we make in our day-to-day lives is crowdsourced,” as Rachel Sonenshine puts it.

But when it comes to dating?

“You are on your own,” Sonenshine, an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, realized.

Crowdsourced feedback and context is lacking in the dating world. But Sonenshine is looking to change that by bringing “accountability, transparency and community” to the online dating experience with the app Wrthy.

What Makes You Wrthy?

Users of Wrthy, the trust and safety platform, are verified through Veriff. Once verified, a woman can submit a potential dater’s profile to the platform. From there, other users — friends, exes, colleagues, family members, or acquaintances who encountered that same person on another dating app — can contribute context and feedback about their experience with him.

The questions the platform can help daters answer questions like: Is he a chronic ghoster? Is he married? Is he juggling multiple simultaneous relationships without disclosure?

The intent isn’t gossip. It is all about ensuring that a dater knows the potential red flags of a person they are looking to date.

Sonenshine found her proof of demand not in a market research report, but on Facebook. On many Are We Dating The Same Guy? pages, women post photos and names of men they’re seeing, hoping others in the community can shed light on their character. Such groups have accumulated hundreds of thousands of members across dozens of cities. The organic, viral growth of those groups demonstrated a clear appetite. But Facebook pages have severe limitations, including lack of verification options and limited functionality, giving rise to Wrthy.

Meet The Founder

Sonenshine spent seven years at Cardlytics, the Atlanta-based advertising and analytics company that went public in 2018, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of National Advertiser Partnerships.

Outside of work, she watched many of her closest friends navigate divorce and re-enter the online dating world. What she heard disturbed her. Women with no information, no context, and no recourse — navigating an ecosystem where a man with a history of harmful behavior could simply hop from Tinder to Hinge to Bumble to Raya the moment he was flagged or banned from one.

Lessons Learned From The Dating App World

Sonenshine has also been paying close attention to what not to build. Her clearest cautionary tale: Tea, a whisper-network app that promised women a safe, anonymous space to share dating safety information. Tea catapulted to one of the most popular apps in the summer 2025, with millions of women signing up. It completely collapsed after a major data breach exposed users’ drivers’ licenses, direct messages, selfies and other sensitive information, according to an NPR report.

The Tea app was subsequently removed from the Apple App Store.

Wrthy is intentionally not gossip-focused, and is focused on building a community that centers around community.

Looking ahead, Sonenshine said she is looking towards Phase Two for the app, which will bring in men to claim their own profiles and receive high-level dating analytics based on personal feedback. For Sonenshine, this is a deliberate move to bring men into the efforts to make online dating safer and better.

After that, Sonenshine sees Wrthy growing into the “the ideal dating app,” as the crowdsourced layer could serve as the foundation for introducing potential daters directly.

The Dating App Future

Wrthy has brought on some angel investment to scale. The team also has a WeFunder crowdfunding campaign open now through March 19.

Sonenshine said she is focused on building market density inside the app moving forward.

“Obviously two-sided ‘marketplaces’ or communities work best when you have enough users in a specific area that are able to communicate with one another and gain value from each other,” she added. “We need marketing dollars in order to win users in Atlanta (our launch market!) and our secondary market, Boston. We believe that once we are able to show success in these markets we will be able to raise a priced round to help support our tech and product growth.”