In a world where dating apps are often dismissed as transactional, exhausting, or impersonal, Amanda Cirello and David Cancel’s love story offers a more optimistic counterpoint: sometimes, technology does not replace fate. Sometimes, it simply gives fate the right interface.
Amanda and David did not meet through a traditional matchmaker, a dinner party, or a chance introduction from one of their many mutual friends. They met on Raya, the famously selective, private membership dating app whose acceptance rate has been widely reported at around eight percent, making it one of the most exclusive dating platforms in the world. Raya describes itself as a private, membership-based community designed for people to connect and collaborate, with a committee looking for that elusive “something extra” that makes a person’s perspective meaningful to the broader community. (Raya)
For Amanda and David, that exclusivity mattered less because of status and more because of alignment. Raya was not just another swipe-based platform. It became the conduit that connected two people whose lives had already been running in parallel.
David, a celebrated tech entrepreneur and five-time founder, had built and sold companies including Compete, Lookery, Performable, Ghostery, and Drift. Amanda, a published scientist with more than thirteen years in pharmaceutical and biotech innovation, had built her career around discovery, science, and emerging technologies. Both had deep Boston roots. Both were intellectually curious. Both were drawn to innovation, art, travel, and philanthropy. Both had been moving through the same orbit for years without ever formally meeting.
They had mutual friends. They went to the same favorite restaurants in Boston. During Covid, they even walked the same paths. Their lives were close enough to overlap, but never close enough to collide. It took Raya’s highly curated ecosystem — and the digital clues in their profiles — to finally make the connection.
Amanda believes the app’s algorithm likely recognized what life had been hinting at all along. Her profile reflected her work as a scientist at Novartis, her curiosity, and her interest in emerging technologies. David’s profile reflected his world as a serial entrepreneur and technology leader. “I think having those keywords in our bios probably got us linked up,” Amanda recalled.
In an age when people often complain that apps have made dating feel less human, Amanda and David’s relationship proves that technology can still be deeply human when it is connecting people around substance, values, and shared life patterns.
That idea — that love can still be magical even when mediated by technology — sits at the heart of their story. “You could have walked by your soulmate hundreds of times,” Amanda reflected during the interview. In their case, they may very well have. The universe provided the near-misses; Raya didn’t invent their compatibility it was the doorway proving that dating apps do work. What mattered was that Amanda and David arrived with intention, openness, and a genuine readiness to meet someone whose life matched their own in ways neither could have engineered.
This July, Amanda and David will celebrate their marriage on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, surrounded by mountains, centuries-old villages, and ninety of their closest family and friends. The three-day wedding will be intimate and immersive, designed less as a spectacle and more as a shared experience rooted in culture, connection, and place.
For Amanda, the location carries a sense of destiny. Thirteen years ago, while on sabbatical from Novartis in Switzerland, she traveled to the Italian lakes and fell in love with their beauty. She told friends and family that if she ever married, she would want to do it there. Years later, engaged to David, she discovered Lake Garda, with its castles, lemon groves, limoncello villages, and quiet grandeur. It felt like the right place for a wedding rooted not in spectacle, but in story.
Amanda’s gown, a custom Galia Lahav design, reflects the Italian setting with full lace, sleeves, and a timeless romantic quality. The welcome party will evoke an Italian marketplace, but with a more sophisticated palette of eggplant, pomegranate, and moving musicians rather than the familiar red-sauce clichés.
Their engagement was equally global and personal. David proposed in South Korea in November 2024 after the couple traveled through Japan and Korea, two destinations that reflected their shared love of culture and discovery. He designed Amanda’s ring himself: a 10.9-carat yellow diamond flanked by two 2-carat diamonds, set on a platinum and yellow gold band.
But beyond the romance, Amanda and David’s partnership is grounded in impact.
David Cancel is known in the technology world as a builder of companies, ideas, and communities. His career has included founding or co-founding Compete, Lookery, Performable, Ghostery, and Drift, with Drift becoming one of Boston’s leading SaaS success stories and reaching unicorn status. Yet his philosophy has always been less about valuation and more about solving real problems, creating meaningful value, and understanding how people connect with technology.
That same human-centered lens carries into his philanthropy. As a Board Member of the Whitney Museum of American Art, David supports artists with bold, original visions, especially underrepresented voices pushing creative and cultural boundaries.
Amanda brings her own powerful blend of science, technology, art, and purpose. A published scientist with more than thirteen years of experience across global pharmaceutical and biotech innovation, she has worked at the intersection of research, rigor, and impact. Beyond the lab, she has helped make STEM more accessible to young students and has championed women in technology and digital culture, including curating Boston’s first NFT art exhibition focused on women in crypto.
Together, Amanda and David are now building a shared philanthropic life through the Whitney Museum of Art. David serves on the board, and Amanda has joined the Whitney Digital Art Committee, where she is helping support a major digital art exhibition. Their work together reflects a rare intersection of their worlds: his background in technology and entrepreneurship, her passion for science and emerging digital culture, and their shared belief in supporting artists, ideas, and communities with lasting impact.
Amanda’s philanthropic work also extends globally. She is involved in a project with the Safar Global Foundation and the Flaviana Matata Foundation to help young girls and women in Tanzania remain in school by building safe, accessible washrooms and supporting scholarships through donations and an annual gala in New York City.
As they look ahead, Amanda and David are embracing a chapter centered on family, travel, philanthropy, art, and perhaps even a future entrepreneurial venture together. They live between Massachusetts and New York City and recently purchased a larger home in Massachusetts, a place they envision as a gathering space for family and friends.
Their story is romantic because it feels improbable. It is modern because it began on an app. And it is hopeful because it challenges the cynicism around dating in the digital age.
Amanda and David may have crossed paths hundreds of times before. They may have sat in the same restaurants, walked the same streets, and met the same people. But it was Raya, with its selective community and its ability to read the signals hidden in a profile, that finally brought them together.
In the end, the app did what the best technology is supposed to do: it made a human connection possible.
And sometimes, even in love, the algorithm gets it exactly right.
