Dating App Bumble Shares Close 63% Higher After IPO, With Founder Becoming ‘Youngest Female CEO To Take A Large U.S. Company Public’

Bumble, which owns the dating app of the same name, began trading today, with shares closing at $70.31, 63% higher than their Initial Public Offering (IPO) price of $43 per share.

Opening at $76, the share price rose more than 80% in just the first minutes of trading. According to Yahoo! Finance, Bumble sold 50 million shares, raising $2.15 billion.

The Bumble app was founded in 2014 by Whitney Wolfe Herd, who also co-founded Tinder. “At age 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest female CEO to take a large US company public,” who told Yahoo Finance Live that the strong market response “likely reflects the company’s ambitions to be more than a dating app.”

“The world has recognized the power of online dating, and the world is about to recognize the power of finding community and connections around whatever you’re looking for on the internet,” Wolfe Herd told Yahoo Finance Live before the stock began trading. “We have been meticulous about building a brand that protects women and engineers accountability and kindness into the internet.”

At the end of its first day of trading, the company closed with a market cap of approximately $7.7 billion.

According to CNBC, “Bumble has a ‘freemium model,’ which means users can join and match for free. It earns the bulk of its revenue from in-app purchases and different subscription offerings like Bumble Boost, which starts at $12.99 a week, and its upgraded Bumble Premium, which starts at $17.99 a week.”

What makes the dating app unique is that “women have to initiate the first conversation for heterosexual matches.” According to Bumble, they had 12.3 million monthly active users as of September 30, with Wolfe Herd telling CNBC that the “company is focusing its efforts on converting more of its user base to those paid customers by reinvesting in future monetization features and product offering.”

In its S-1 filing, the Austin-based company said that it generated $376.6 million in revenue in the first three quarters of 2020, amounting to a net loss of $84.1 million. CNBC reported that, “In that same time period in 2019, it brought in revenue of $362.6 million, and reported a net profit of $68.6 million.”

Bumble’s main competitor is Match Group, a company which owns other dating apps like Hinge and Tinder, which has a market cap of $45.5 billion.

“Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan led the offering,” wrote CNBC.

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