Mark Kantor

Mark Kantor is a consumer-product and growth operator turned angel investor, best known for a roughly six-year run at social-gaming company Zynga, where he served as General Manager and Head of Growth. During that time he is credited with shipping more than 20 games, growing Zynga's audience by millions of daily active users (DAU), and leading platform partnerships with Facebook and Snapchat. One of his early hits was Graffiti, a social-creativity app that grew to more than 25 million users and reached its first million DAU in under a week.

Kantor is a repeat founder in addition to his operating work: he co-founded Graffiti Labs (the studio behind the Graffiti app) and later the startup Yellowbrick. He has a Y Combinator background tied to his founding activity. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with a minor in International Business from Brandeis University.

In August 2023, Match Group appointed Kantor as Vice President of Innovation, where he leads the "Art x Science Lab" (ASL) — a small team of engineers and product designers building new, largely generative-AI-driven features across Match Group's dating apps (Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge and others), including tools to help users pick photos, generate dating bios, and improve safety and accessibility.

Alongside his operating career, Kantor has invested his own capital as an angel into early-stage startups, concentrating on consumer and B2B software companies, many emerging from the Bay Area / Y Combinator ecosystem.

• Invests as an individual angel, primarily at pre-seed and seed stages.
• Sector lean: consumer internet and mobile, social/creativity products, SaaS and business-productivity tools, fintech/personal finance, education, hardware, and online dating — areas that mirror his operating expertise in consumer growth and engagement.
• Track record skews toward founder-tools and developer/operator-facing B2B software (e.g., Clerky for startup legal/formation, Quartzy for lab management, MixRank for sales/data).
• Public data classifies him as a relatively low-frequency angel with a small number of disclosed deals rather than a high-volume check-writer; his edge for founders is operator experience in scaling consumer products and growth, not a large fund.
• No publicly stated check size; angel-scale (typically small individual checks) should be assumed.