Love Conquers All as Bumble Co-Founder Becomes Billionaire
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Bumble co-founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd has become the youngest-ever self-made female billionaire at 31, after taking the company public this week.
Shares of the dating app, which uniquely only allows women to make the first move, soared in its IPO on Thursday, with stock opening at $76 on the Nasdaq, far higher than its initial IPO price of $43. Wolfe Herd herself owns 21.54 million shares, around 12 per cent of the company, which now represents a net personal worth of $1.6bn. The IPO puts Wolfe Herd in a rare club — self-made businesswomen account for fewer than five per cent of the world's 500 biggest fortunes.
Bumble is the second big dating app to go public. Match.com parent company Match Group’s IPO was in 2015, with the group attempting to buy Wolfe Herd’s company two years later in 2017 for $450m.
This week’s successful IPO is the latest twist in Wolfe Herd’s ground-breaking career, having set the dating app up in 2014 following her departure from Tinder over claims of sexual discrimination and harassment from male co-founders.
Wolfe claimed she was stripped of her co-founder title at Tinder after ex-boyfriend and partner Justin Mateen said having a female in charge made the company ‘seem like a joke’ and ‘devalued’ the company’s business, a view that now seems particularly ironic.
Having sued Mateen and fellow partner Sean Rad in a case that was settled confidentially out of court by Tinder, Herd created Bumble in 2014 with the tag line ‘by women, for women’. Her business partner, Russian tech tycoon Andrey Andreev, left Bumble in 2020, with private equity firm Blackstone Group stepping in to buy his stake in a deal that valued the company at $3bn.
Bumble reported $417m in revenue in the first nine months of 2020, up from $363m over the same time frame in 2019.
Along with its female-first connection policy on the app itself, the company promotes itself as a place to work where women are safe and empowered. Wolfe Herd has continued to build on this feminist ethos by announcing new parental benefits for Bumble employees including bonuses, paid leave, and flexible start times following the birth of her son, Bobby, in 2019.
In the wake of the flotation, she tweeted: ‘Today, @Bumble becomes a public company. This is only possible thanks to the more than 1.7bn first moves made by brave women on our app — and the pioneering women who paved the way for us in the business world. To everyone who made today possible: thank you. #BumbleIPO.’