Eharmony Com

As of today, EHarmony comes out of the closet. The adamantly heterosexual dating website, which has accepted only male-female couples since its inception in 2000, is launching a gay matchmaking service called Compatible Partners ( www.compatiblepartners.com).

A Northern California woman sued the operator of online dating service EHarmony, alleging the Pasadena company violated state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation. Linda Carlson said she tried to use the website in February to meet a woman but couldn't because the site offers to find a compatible match only for men seeking women or women seeking men, according to her suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

First comes online love, then comes interactive marriage. That's the plan for dating site EHarmony.com Inc., which today launches an Internet service aimed at strengthening marriages. "We call it a marriage wellness service," said company founder and pitchman Neil Clark Warren, 71, whose ebullient manner and upbeat commercials have been parodied by Jay Leno and on "Saturday Night Live."

Neil Clark Warren, founder of the online dating site EHarmony.com Inc., does matchmaking by the numbers. Subscribers fill in 436 answers on a questionnaire. The company's computers then use a secret formula to match people using what Warren calls the 29 "dimensions" of a successful relationship, a system based on his decades of experience as a psychologist.

Online matchmaker EHarmony.com said Monday that it raised nearly $110 million in venture capital in what experts said was a vote of confidence in the online dating industry. Pasadena-based EHarmony sold preferred stock to 14 investors including Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, two of the early backers of Internet search titan Google Inc. The company declined to discuss terms of the deal.