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A date with the stock market:
Bumble boss
Whitney Wolfe Herd
was one of the founders of Tinder before she left the company in an argument
Photo: REUTERS
Allegedly, she even invented the name Tinder.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
(31) was one of the founders of the dating app and helped make the brand world famous as head of marketing.
In 2014, however, she left Tinder in a dispute, she sued the company, it was about sexual harassment by colleagues.
Rumor has it that she received more than $ 1 million plus a package of stock options as part of a settlement with the company.
In 2014 Wolfe Herd founded
Bumble
together with the Russian-British tech entrepreneur and billionaire
Andrey Andreev
(47).
Wolfe Herd is now going public with its Tinder competitor.
The key difference: At Bumble only women can take the first step towards a meeting.
The dating app is expected to go public on the New York tech exchange Nasdaq at the end of February.
At the beginning of this week, the company increased its stock market plans again: instead of placing 34.5 million shares at $ 28 to 30 each as previously planned, it should now be 45 million at $ 39 each.
Bumble wants to make at least $ 1.8 billion.
The company would have a market value of around seven billion dollars.
"The 'women first' approach gave Bumble an effective advantage in entering the market," said Jeremy Abelson, a fund manager at Irving Investors, to Bloomberg.
The company is still in an early phase and internationalization could drive growth, he believes.
According to the documents that Bumble submitted to the US regulator SEC before going public, the dating app recently had around 42 million monthly active users in more than 150 countries.
2.4 million users pay for the offer.
According to the company, there have already been 1.7 billion contact admissions via the app since the start of 2014.
Sometimes profit, sometimes loss
The business model of Bumble and its sister app Badoo is based on a "freemium model", which is basically free of charge, according to the papers.
However, by taking out a subscription, users can activate additional functions for a fee, which are intended to increase the likelihood of suitable contacts.
In this way, Bumble had sales of $ 360.1 and $ 488.9 million in 2018 and 2019.
From January 1 to the end of September last year, sales were $ 416.6 million.
The earnings situation on the basis of these revenues is apparently not yet very stable.
While 2018 had a net loss of $ 23.7 million, the company claims a net profit of $ 85.8 million for 2019.
In the first nine months of last year, Bumble posted a net loss of $ 116.7 million.
Bumble expresses itself however - how could it be otherwise - optimistic for the further development.
Studies have shown that online dating is now the most common way of getting to know each other in the US.
The still increasing use of smartphones and changing cultural habits would reinforce this trend.
Bumble therefore sees "significant growth opportunities" for its own business: increasing numbers of users in existing markets, new users in markets that are still to be developed, product innovations and additional ways of monetizing user behavior - all of this should drive future profits.
Private investors have nothing to say
Small downer: As is often the case with newcomers to the tech genre, the IPO can at best be of financial interest to investors - they will hardly have a say in Bumble.
After an investment in 2019, the majority of the company's shares are held by the US private equity giant Blackstone, which will hold around 80 percent of the voting rights after the IPO.
Bumble boss Wolfe Herd will also retain voting rights of a further 16 percent after the IPO, according to the SEC documents.
There is not much left for private investors.
The Bumble IPO comes at a time when more sales are being made with market debuts on US stock exchanges than it has been in more than 20 years, reports the Reuters news agency.
According to Dealogic, companies raised a total of $ 168 billion with IPOs on US stock exchanges in 2020 alone.
This year, there are also more IPOs pending than there has been in two decades.
Bumble's is expected in late February.
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