EduLender is a Chicago based startup comparison search engine company intended to find student loans. EduLender has raised $1 million in seed funding from Hyde Park Angels, Kapor Capital, New World Ventures, Sandbox Ventures, Excelerate, and OKCupid co-founder Sam Yagan.

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) subsidiary Match.com has acquired OkCupid for $50 million in cash. This deal includes future earn-outs based on performance. OkCupid is free, but makes money from advertising. OkCupid has raised $6 million in funding and it was co-founded by Max Krohn, Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne, and Christian Rudder. OkCupid will continue to operate out of their offices in New York.

“Our goal is to reduce GDP by half a million dollars by completely eliminating the subscription online dating market,” stated Sam Yagan, the CEO of OkCupid.  OkCupid has just raised $6 million from a group of angel investors.  Sam Yagan told GigaOM that OkCupid can pull off a very successful dating website without making users pay like PlentyOfFish does.

OkCupid has 600K+ active users (people that have logged in within 90 days), but Match.com has 1.3 million subscribers and PlentyOfFish reports that there are 250K users logging in every day.  “All of the big guys think users want to pay for dating because paying for something equals quality,” stated Yagan.  “Well, unless Match.com has some way of getting Tom Cruise and all the actors and actresses to stand behind a firewall, our users are their users.”

Sam Yagan has previously founded SparkNotes and sold it Barnes & Noble in 2001.  Yagan also founded eDonkey, a P2P software that was later shut down by the RIAA.

[Source: GigaOM]