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Bumble Plans To Go Private
Bumble bucks // Illustration by Kate Walker
Dating-app startup Bumble is reportedly in talks with Ithaca Holdings to go private.
Why It Matches: Bumble was one of the great behemoths of the dating-app revolution last decade, alongside Tinder and Hinge. But people’s relationship with dating has shifted dramatically, with more people now preferring IRL interactions to find deeper connections, avoid choice fatigue, or simply not get ghosted. Bumble’s go-private deal suggests that markets are moving on as well.
Behind The Deal: Bumble no longer wants its financial relationship status to be public.
Ithaca Holdings would take the company private in a deal worth about $1 billion, which could close as soon as this week.
That’s a major sweetener for a company previously valued at just $335 million.
News of the deal sent Bumble’s stock skyrocketing 50%, bringing its valuation to $580 million.
Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is “expected to roll at least part of her stake in the dating app as part of the deal and remain involved with the company,” per WSJ.
Closing Thoughts: Bumble’s billion-dollar deal marks a major decline from the $14 billion valuation it reached when it IPO’ed in February 2021. Over the past five years, the company has struggled to sustain revenue, seen its stock lose 90% of its value, watched Wolfe Herd get fired and then rehired, and even dropped its novel women-chat-first feature.
But maybe there’s a fresh strategy under Ithaca, which was founded by former Meta Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman and Sequoia Capital partner Ravi Gupta. The firm’s mission is to use frontier tech like AI to reshape businesses. Bumble has already been experimenting with AI to overhaul the app experience, so maybe Ithaca can supercharge those efforts.
Prediction: As a private company, Bumble could totally reinvent its platform to differentiate itself from competitors… and simply use its name as a marketing hook.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited, polled, and copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.