Bumble Inc

Who We Are

Bumble’s mission is to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable, through Kind Connections. Our platform enables people to connect and build healthy and equitable relationships on their own terms. We focus on building authenticity and safety in the online space, which is marked at times by isolation and toxicity. We also have extended our platform beyond online dating into healthy relationships in other areas of life, such as friendships.

The Bumble brand was built with women at the center. Our platform is designed to be safe and empowering for women, and, in turn, provides a better environment for everyone. We are leveraging innovative technology solutions to create a more inclusive, safe and accountable way to connect online for all users regardless of gender.

In 2023, we operated five apps, Bumble app, Bumble For Friends app, Badoo app, Fruitz app and Official app, where during 2023, on average, over 42 million users came on a monthly basis to discover new people and connect with each other in a safe, secure and empowering environment. Our apps monetize via a freemium model, where the use of the service is free and a subset of the users pay for subscriptions or in-app purchases to access premium features. We are a leader in the online dating space, which has become increasingly popular over the last decade and has been cited as the most common way for new couples to meet in the United States.

Bumble app, launched in 2014, is one of the first dating apps built with women at the center, where women make the first move. Bumble app is a leader in the online dating sector across several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. We had approximately 2.5 million Bumble App Paying Users during the year ended December 31, 2023.

Badoo app, launched in 2006, was one of the pioneers of web and mobile free-to-use dating products. Badoo app’s focus is to make finding meaningful connections easy, fun and accessible for a mainstream global audience. Badoo app continues to be a market leader in Europe and Latin America. We had approximately 1.2 million Badoo App and Other Paying Users during the year ended December 31, 2023.

In January 2022, we acquired Fruitz, an intentions-driven dating app focused on Gen Z, operating in EMEA and Canada. In April 2023, we acquired Official, an app that is intended to help couples build healthy and lasting habits in their romantic relationships. Building on the BFF mode in Bumble app, in July 2023 we officially launched a standalone Bumble For Friends app. Bumble For Friends app is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet people nearby and create meaningful platonic connections.

Bumble is more than our apps—we are powering a movement. Our mission-first strategy ensures that values guide our business decisions and our business performance enables us to drive impact. Our strategy is anchored by our powerful brand, product leadership, operational excellence, and public policy and social impact initiatives. Examples of how our mission drives our business include:

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We enhance our brand through initiatives beyond our apps, including advocating for policy and legislative solutions to prohibit nonconsensual intimate image abuse and other online harms, including unsolicited lewd photos.

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We engage in worldwide nonprofit partnerships to support healthy, safe, and equitable relationships, and to further our commitment to equity by supporting women and other underrepresented communities.

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We enhance our brand through marketing campaigns centered around elevating women, including the “Believe Women” and “Love Letters to Black Women” campaigns.

We believe that the best way to compete in a world where people have multiple ways to connect is through product innovation. We uniquely design our products to facilitate engagement prioritizing safety and accountability across the user experience. We continuously collect user feedback, which informs our product development roadmap. The more we know about our community’s interests, the better we can innovate products that maximize their chances of making connections most likely to turn into the relationships they are seeking.

Our apps share some common infrastructure, which allows insights to be shared between apps and is critical to providing our users with personalized and superior experiences. Our team has a strong track record of product leadership in online dating. We were the first company in the dating app industry to develop technology to proactively blur lewd photos shared within a chat, which we open-sourced in 2022 for the technology community as part of a larger effort to help rid the internet of “cyberflashing,” the sharing of unsolicited lewd photos online. We are continuously introducing new artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance our users' experience and safety, such as the recently announced Deception Detector, which uses artificial intelligence to help identify spam, scam, and fake profiles. In addition, the insights we have gained from our community have encouraged us to extend Bumble app into many more areas of life, such as platonic friendships and business networking, and we have built our platform with the flexibility to pursue these opportunities.

Our Technology Has Transformed Online Dating

Technology is at the core of what differentiates our platform. We have a global team of software engineers and product managers who drive the development of our platform. We release live updates rapidly, often once a week to our mobile app and twice a day to our server backend, allowing us to run dozens of tests simultaneously across the entire audience. The rapid nature of our testing framework allows us to optimize the user experience. Our technology and product teams work hand in hand from ideation to product launch, and this has allowed us to be at the forefront of releasing features geared towards improving the safety of our community.

Our technology platform is fueled by:

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Shared infrastructure: Our shared infrastructure allows us to quickly test new features, provides us with flexibility to migrate features from one app to another where appropriate, and improves execution at scale by driving faster improvements in our apps, while simultaneously driving operating efficiencies by reducing the cost of launching new features. Given our shared infrastructure, we can also innovate and scale efficiently as we enter new geographies and new categories outside online dating. Moreover, in seeking to acquire companies, we look for opportunities to leverage our shared infrastructure (for example, our content moderation capabilities) to accelerate their product roadmap.

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Our data and machine learning capabilities: We are continually analyzing data from user interactions on our platform, allowing us to constantly optimize the user experience. We have introduced artificial intelligence capabilities that we leverage to personalize the potential matches we display, inform our product pipeline and otherwise tailor the experience for specific users. Our artificial intelligence capabilities play a key role in creating a safe environment for our users, providing protection against identity fraud as well as blocking inappropriate behavior and content from polluting our platform.

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Our data protection and privacy standards: We are both committed and mandated to adhere to strict privacy standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union and the United Kingdom and several state laws in the United States (each as discussed below in “—Licensing and Regulation”).

Bumble App

On Bumble app, users can input information about themselves and set up a profile, which can be customized in many ways, such as by adding a Badge to prominently display certain values or characteristics. We use a matching algorithm combined with the preferences provided by users to recommend potential connections. Users can opt to use one of our filters to be more specific in the types of matches they see. A user can swipe right to vote “yes” to a potential match, or left to go to the next profile, or, in most of our markets, leave a compliment on a bio, specific photo or profile prompt on someone’s profile. When both users vote yes, a connection is made. After an initial match is formed, users on Bumble app must initiate a chat within 24 hours or the connection disappears. In a heterosexual connection, women make the first move by initiating a chat.

In addition to prioritizing verification of user photos and offering communication like voice and video chat tools to allow interactions before or in lieu of in-person meeting without exchanging sensitive personal information, we have also engineered other safety features such as our proactive safety monitoring. This feature uses machine learning to identify harassment and identity-based hate, which is then flagged to moderators to review and action appropriately according to our Community Guidelines.

Our subscription offerings, Bumble Boost and Bumble Premium, provide users with additional features to increase their success in making a meaningful connection. The most popular features in the subscription plans include: Unlimited Rematch, where subscribers have an unlimited number of opportunities to rematch with prior matches that have already expired after a 24-hour period; and Unlimited Extends, where subscribers have an unlimited number of 24-hour extensions on conversations. There are also additional, in-app purchases that subscribers and non-subscribing users can purchase, such as SuperSwipe (to inform potential matches that the user is confidently interested in them) and Spotlight (to advance the user's profile to the top of the list of potential matches so it is viewable by more potential matches instantly). In 2023, we introduced a new subscription tier, Bumble Premium Plus. The Premium Plus tier offers expanded benefits, including being able to see whose profile is trending.

Badoo App

On Badoo app, users’ profiles can be customized in many ways, such as by using the “Moods” feature to share what's on their minds, either based around their current emotions or what kind of date they want to pursue. Badoo app has a similar matching algorithm to

Bumble app and the same vote “yes” or “no” methodology by swiping right and left, respectively. It allows users the option to directly message anyone who is of interest without having to mutually vote yes.

On Badoo app, we have engineered safety features such as Rude Message Detector, which uses machine learning to detect any text that could be perceived as rude, abusive, homophobic or discriminatory and gives the user the control to dismiss the message if they are not comfortable with the language used.

Our subscription offerings on Badoo app, Badoo Premium and Badoo Premium Plus, allow additional features such as: Liked You, which allows users to find out who has already liked them; and Invisible Mode, which allows users to browse the app without being shown to other users. Badoo app also offers Badoo Credits, which can be purchased in bundles and used to acquire in-app features such as one-off popularity boosts.

Fruitz App

Fruitz app requires all users to select a profile fruit to indicate their dating intention: cherries for those seeking a serious relationship, grapes for those looking to date, watermelons for those who are not seeking anything serious, and peaches for those looking for a casual relationship. This simple feature normalizes the notion of users sharing their dating intentions from the first touchpoint with any user, encouraging honesty and transparency. Fruitz app's premium subscription offerings are Fruitz Premium and Fruitz Golden. Premium features include: Filter by Fruit, which enables users to filter other users by their dating intention, represented by their fruit, and Who Liked Me, which allows users to see who has already liked them, among others.

Official App

On Official app, users connect their profile with that of their partner, enabling a shared, linked product experience. The app is intended to help couples build healthy and lasting habits in their relationships, with features that promote communication, self-reflection, memory sharing, and discovery. Features include: daily check-ins, quizzes, partner nudges, shared notes, and date idea discovery, among others. In 2023, Official launched its premium subscription offering, which unlocks expanded content across features.

Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz Modes

In addition to dating, in Bumble app we also provide products that enable social connection, offering users the opportunity to develop platonic connections through the BFF mode for friendships and through the Bizz mode for professional networking and mentorship. The BFF and Bizz modes have a format similar to the Date mode, requiring users to set up profiles and matching users through “yes” and “no” votes, similar to the dating platform.

Bumble For Friends App

Bumble For Friends app works in a similar way to the Date and BFF modes on Bumble app. When two users vote “yes” by swiping right on a profile, a connection is made. Either user can initiate a chat. Unlike in the BFF mode on Bumble app, on Bumble For Friends app any user with two or more connections can create a group chat, and using the Plans feature, users can easily organize an in-person meetup.

How We Grow Our Community

We are investing in growing our community by building our apps as distinct brands with complementary but unique user value propositions. For Bumble app, we educate audiences on how women making the first move creates healthier relationships. Badoo app is about helping people overcome the self-doubt they might feel, to open themselves up to others, embrace the journey of meeting people to figure out what they want. Fruitz app is centered around encouraging honesty and transparency by sharing dating intentions from the first touch point. Official app is about helping couples build healthy and equitable relationships by facilitating communication, connection and fun between partners. Bumble For Friends app is about recognizing, creating and celebrating meaningful local friendship and community for people in all stages of life.

Each of our apps has a specific brand and marketing approach that is appropriate for its business model, stage of maturity and local market nuances. For example, our Bumble app marketing uses hyperlocal messaging brought to life through large-scale campaigns alongside grassroots community building based on our core audience's location.

Our brands’ marketing strategies are especially effective due to our centralized performance marketing, partnership, and creative functions. These centralized functions enable us to share marketing learnings across our apps and geographies, allowing for the broadest application of successful strategies.

Our Impact

Since the founding of Bumble app, we have established, engaged in, and supported a wide range of public policy and social impact efforts to further our mission, primarily focused on women’s empowerment, healthy relationship education, and the reduction in toxicity on our platform and society at large. These include:

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Engaging Experts to Make our Platform Safe: We leverage both internal and external experts to continuously improve upon our policies and community guidelines. For example, we are a member of the Tech Coalition, an industry body that shares best practices to combat child sexual exploitation online.

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In-App Integration of Bumble Initiatives: The Moves Making Impact product feature within Bumble app allows a user to select and support a cause that matters to them and is relevant to the Bumble brand and mission, each time that user sends a first message.

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Policy Advocacy and Legislation Efforts: In 2019, we helped pass one of the first state-level laws to address the act of sending unsolicited lewd photos in Texas, and have since helped pass similar legislation in California and Virginia. In 2021, we launched a campaign in the UK to support the enactment of a law that makes the unsolicited sending of nude images illegal, and in October 2023 the Online Safety Act was passed, which criminalized cyberflashing.

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Addressing artificial intelligence-enabled harms: We have worked with Partnership on AI (PAI) on developing and launching PAI’s Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media, which serves as a guide to devising policies, practices, and technical interventions that interrupt harmful uses of generative artificial intelligence.

Human Capital

Our company culture and people practices are critical to achieving our mission of creating a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable, through Kind Connections, and our values are rooted in growth, kindness, equity, accountability and honesty.

Diversity & Inclusion

The diversity of our management team and workforce is key to our success and reflects our mission and values. We strongly encourage people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and non-binary people, veterans, parents, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people to apply to work with us. We seek to be fully reflective of the communities we serve around the world. As of December 31, 2023, 73% of our Board and more than 50% of our management team were women. As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 1,200 full-time employees, of which approximately 980 were located outside of the United States.

We are focused on building an inclusive culture and sustaining a diverse workforce through a variety of company initiatives. As part of that effort, we have established several employee resource groups (“ERG”s), each with a mission of bringing our employees together, collectively learning, sharing meaningful experiences, addressing challenges, providing access to supportive services and building inclusive communities within Bumble. At the center of this initiative is Diversibees, an intersectional, employee-led organization consisting of approximately 300 employees. Single-identity affinity groups come together under the Diversibees umbrella. Our ERGs sponsor many initiatives throughout the year, which build community and advocacy through workshops, newsletters, listening circles, leadership development and other training programs, and cultural celebrations.

In 2023, we launched our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging strategic framework, which focuses on three pillars: harmonization (working together to create an inclusive culture), ensemble (embracing our differences so that we all feel we belong), and transcend (expanding our brand to become an employer of choice for marginalized groups in technology).

Other company initiatives include: continuing to expand the role of our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Center of Excellence, providing diversity and inclusion training to all employees, and continuing our investment in the Bumble Tech Academy graduates, which encourages and supports the transition of talent from underrepresented groups and communities to the tech sector.

Talent Acquisition, Development & Retention

We compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, particularly people with expertise in computer science, software engineering, product development, data science and engineering and machine learning. Our ability to recruit top talent is driven by our mission-first orientation, meaningful and impactful work, commitment to employee development, health and wellbeing and our brands’ reputation.

We invest in development to help employees grow and build their careers. We sponsor training, education and leadership development opportunities for our employees designed to provide them with the knowledge, skills and habits necessary to succeed in their jobs and careers. In 2023, we continued to refine our performance evaluation processes and carried out a company-wide manager development program.

To build an organization where employees feel engaged, valued and heard, we gather and respond to employees’ feedback in a variety of ways, including through periodic employee engagement surveys, new joiner surveys, one-on-one interactions, and regular “All Hands” meetings that bring the entire company together. Participation in our most recent employee engagement survey was active, with approximately seven in ten employees completing the survey. We maintain open lines of communication to help us understand our employees’ needs so that we can continuously improve as an employer of choice for our current and future employees.

Benefits, Safety & Wellbeing

The success of our business is fundamentally connected to the wellbeing of our people. We continue to invest in benefits that help our employees and their families, support the Bumble mission, and align with market practice across five key health pillars: physical, mental, financial, family, and social.

We offer a competitive benefits package, which includes access to private healthcare coverage for employees and their families, paid six-month leave for parents regardless of gender, path to parenthood support, unlimited paid time off, and paid leave for survivors of domestic violence or violent crimes. All employees have access to a wellbeing portal. We also help prepare our employees for a secure future by investing in initiatives for financial and retirement planning.

The safety of our employees remains among our top priorities. We regularly engage a mental health liaison to work with our internal safety team, host benefit sessions on topics of safety, and offer targeted mental healthcare resources to our internal safety team employees, providing an additional layer of care for their wellbeing.

Competition

The online dating industry is growing and highly competitive. We compete with a number of companies that provide dating products and services for the same markets in which we operate, including other online dating platforms and social media platforms. In addition, we compete with offline dating services, such as in-person matchmakers, as well as more traditional forms of dating that involve people meeting offline without the use of dating products or services altogether. Because of the extensibility of the Bumble app platform beyond dating, we also compete with social media and networking platforms in that context.

Intellectual Property

We believe that our rights in our intellectual property, including but not limited to patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks and domain names, as well as contractual provisions and restrictions on access to our proprietary technology, are important to our marketing efforts to develop brand recognition and differentiate our brand from our competitors. We own a number of trademarks that have been registered, or for which registration applications are pending, in the U.S. as well as in certain foreign jurisdictions. These trademarks include, among others, BUMBLE, BUMBLE FOR FRIENDS, BADOO, FRUITZ and OFFICIAL. The current registrations of these trademarks are effective for varying periods of time and may be renewed periodically, provided that we, as the registered owner, or our licensees where applicable, comply with all applicable renewal requirements including, where necessary, the continued use of the trademarks in connection with similar services and goods. We expect to pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe they would be beneficial and cost-effective.

In addition to trademark protection, we own numerous domain names, including www.bumble.com, and patents and designs for various product features. We also enter into, and rely on, confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants, contractors and business partners to protect our inventions, trade secrets, proprietary technology and other confidential information. We further protect the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in both our customer terms of use on our website and in our vendor terms and conditions. For information regarding risks related to our intellectual property, please see “Item 1A—Risk Factors—Risks Related to Intellectual Property.”

Seasonality

We experience seasonality in user growth, user engagement, Paying User growth, and monetization on our platform. Historically, we have seen an increase in all of these metrics in January due in part to seasonal demand in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, and during the Northern Hemisphere summer. Generally, our highest performing months for user growth and user engagement are during the first and third quarters of the fiscal year, and our highest performing months for Total Paying Users are in the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year. Seasonal trends are difficult to predict accurately and may change from year to year.

Licensing and Regulation

We are subject to a variety of laws and regulations in the United States and around the world that involve matters central to our business. Many of these laws and regulations are still evolving and being tested in courts, and could be interpreted in ways that could harm our business. These laws may relate to privacy and data protection, online safety, rights of publicity, content, intellectual property, advertising, marketing, distribution, data security, electronic contracts and other communications, artificial intelligence, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, telecommunications, taxation, economic or other trade prohibitions or sanctions, anti-corruption law compliance, securities law compliance, online payment services, and labor and employment. We currently, and from time to time, may not be in technical compliance with all such laws. Foreign data protection, privacy, content, competition, and other laws and regulations can impose different obligations or be more restrictive than those in the United States. U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, which in some cases can be enforced by private parties in addition to government entities, are constantly evolving and can be subject to significant change. As a result, the application, interpretation, and enforcement of these laws and regulations are often uncertain and difficult to predict, particularly in the rapidly evolving industry in which we operate, and may be interpreted and applied inconsistently from country to country and inconsistently with our current policies and practices.

Proposed, new and evolving legislation and regulations could also significantly affect our business. For example, the implications of the European Union (“EU”) and United Kingdom’s General Data Protection Regulation, which applies to our products and services, are far-reaching and constantly evolving. In addition to these laws, there are a number of legislative proposals in the EU as well as other jurisdictions that could impose new obligations or limitations in areas affecting our business. There are other privacy and data protection laws and regulations that impact the products and services we offer to users in different countries. In the United States, there are a number of existing state laws, such as those in California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Illinois, as well as others that are to come into force in the coming years, in addition to a potential comprehensive federal privacy statute. Agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission are increasing their enforcement efforts and considering adopting new privacy rules. New privacy laws or regulations are likely to grant enhanced privacy rights to individuals and impose obligations on us as a business operating in those jurisdictions. In addition, some countries are considering or have passed legislation requiring local storage and processing of data or similar requirements that could increase the cost and complexity of delivering our services. For information regarding risks related to these compliance requirements, please see “Item 1A—Risk Factors—Risks Related to Regulation and Litigation—We must comply with rapidly evolving privacy and data protection laws across jurisdictions, and the failure to do so could result in claims, changes to our business practices, monetary penalties, increased cost of operations, or declines in user growth or engagement, or otherwise harm our business.”

In addition to privacy laws, there are emerging online safety laws globally such as the EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act and U.S. laws targeting companies that operate online dating services that have already come into effect or are coming into effect in 2024, which include significant penalties for non-compliance. There is also a developing trend for online safety codes to target specific industries such as the online dating industry (for example, in Australia). Such online safety laws and codes may require us, in the future, to change our products, business practices or operations, which could adversely affect user growth and engagement and increase compliance costs for our business.

The foregoing description does not include an exhaustive list of the laws and regulations governing or impacting our business. See the discussion contained in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report for information regarding how actions by regulatory authorities or changes in legislation and regulation in the jurisdictions in which we operate may have a material adverse effect on our business.

Additional Information

Bumble Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on October 5, 2020. Our principal executive offices are located at 1105 West 41st Street, Austin, Texas 78756, and our telephone number is (512) 696-1409.

Our website address is www.bumble.com and our investor relations website is located at https://ir.bumble.com. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report. Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, (the “Exchange Act”) are available free of charge on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”).

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations website. The contents of these websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this report or in any other report or document we file.

Website and Social Media Disclosure

We use our websites (www.bumble.com and ir.bumble.com) and at times our corporate X account (formerly known as Twitter) (@bumble) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/company/bumble) to distribute company information. The information we post through these channels may be deemed material. Accordingly, investors should monitor these channels, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. In addition, you may automatically receive e-mail alerts and other information about Bumble when you enroll your e-mail address by visiting the “E-mail Alerts” section of our website at ir.bumble.com. The contents of our website and social media channels are not, however, a part of this Annual Report.