Saturday February 13th 2021
Share the dating app asked
Bumble boss overnight billionaire
Seven years ago Whitney Wolfe Herd founded the dating app Bumble. The Tinder rival has been listed on the stock exchange since Thursday and is making a brilliant start. The 31-year-old CEO becomes a billionaire practically overnight.
The IPO of the dating app provider Bumble has made the boss of the company, which has been listed since Thursday, a billionaire. Whitney Wolfe Herd, 31, holds 21.5 million shares, which closed on Friday at more than $ 75 per share. This corresponds to a stake in the company of almost twelve percent. This is worth almost two billion dollars on the market.
The shares of the Tinder rival started brilliantly on the US technology exchange Nasdaq on Thursday. The securities of the operator of the Bumble and Badoo platforms, which are listed under the ticker abbreviation BMBL, met with strong investor interest – the initial price of 76 US dollars was almost 77 percent above the issue price. Overall, the company was valued at around $ 8.2 billion when it went public.
The Bumble app was launched in 2014 by Herd, who was already one of the co-founders of its major competitor Tinder and is now the youngest CEO to date to list a major US company on the stock exchange. A special feature of Bumble is that women take the first step in dating there. In the nine months ending September 2020, the company made a net loss of $ 28 million.
Despite the red numbers, demand for the shares was so high before the IPO that Bumble eventually offered 50 million shares instead of the originally planned issue of 35 million shares. In addition, the issue price was raised from initially 30 to 43 dollars per share. Bumble wanted to take around two billion dollars with the IPO and thus finance further growth and steal market share from the counterparty Tinder.
.