Today is when women make the first move, says youngest woman billionaire and Bumble founder on IPO

"Today is what happens when women make the first move," tweeted Whitney Wolfe Herd, Founder and CEO of Bumble, the latest female entry to the billionaire club with Bumble's IPO on NASDAQ, which saw its shares soar 67 percent in its trading debut to $72, valuing Whitney’s stake at $1.5 billion, making her the youngest self-made female billionaire to do so.

According to reports, of the 559 companies that have gone public in the US over the past 12 months, only two, aside from Bumble, were founded by women.

Whitney, 31, started Bumble in 2014, after her stint at Tinder as a co-founder. Speaking with YourStory at the time of Priyanka Chopra-backed Bumble's launch in India, Whitney had said that Bumble is not just a dating app and it does not compete with Tinder. She said Bumble is a mission-driven social connection platform that connects people, especially women, across the most important relationships of their lives in love, friendship, and business.

On Bumble, only women make the first move. In 2020, Bumble reached 100 million users across the world.

Clarifying that Tinder is not its competition, Wolfe Herd said, “We are not a dating app, we are an app with three verticals: dating, friend-finding, and business networking. We allow the user to delete the dating option if they wish to. You can actually turn it into a non-dating app,” she explained.

ALSO READ

What’s the buzz around Priyanka Chopra-backed social networking platform Bumble?

In an earlier interview with YourStory, Whitney had said that Bumble is the first successful technology product built for women, by women, that has reached any type of scale.

Wolfe Herd said, “If you look at all the successful platforms that have come before us, they are all built by men, and the foundational vision was never around making a world a better place for women. It was around helping you get a car faster, or getting a man a date faster; it was never about the woman.”

Wolfe Herd, who is also a Tinder co-founder, added that this is why she built the app keeping women in mind. “I have built what I wished existed when I was a young woman. It is truly a women’s platform,” she said.

On February 10, Bumble Inc announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 50 million shares of its Class A common stock at a price to the public of $43.00 per share. Bumble has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 7.5 million shares of Class A common stock. The shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on February 11, 2021 under the symbol “BMBL”.