Shares in Bumble, which operates a dating app of the same name, closed 63.5% on Thursday’s Nasdaq IPO.
The company’s stock rose nearly 77% to $ 76 per share under the ticker symbol “BMBL”. The shares were valued at $ 43 apiece over the target range of $ 37-39 and sold 50 million shares.
The company closed trading on a market cap of approximately $ 7.7 billion.
Founded in 2014 by CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble is where women must initiate the first conversation for straight games. At 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest female founder to have a US company listed on the stock exchange. She’s also on an extremely small list of female founders who led IPOs, including Stitch Fix’s Katrina Lake, who floated her company in 2017, and Julie Wainwright, who floated The RealReal in 2019.
Bumble has a “freemium model” which means users can join and match for free. Most of the revenue comes from in-app purchases and various subscription offers such as Bumble Boost (starting at $ 12.99 per week) and Bumble Premium (starting at $ 17.99 per week).
With the paid offers, users can, for example, make their profile better known, see who liked their profile first, or put themselves into travel mode. It’s a similar model to the competing apps Hinge and Tinder, where users can use the core features for free but pay to continue using them. For example, Hinge’s “Preferred” membership is priced at $ 19.99 per month. Bumble also makes some money in advertising and partnerships.
The company said it had 12.3 million monthly active users as of September 30th. Speaking to CNBC ahead of the company’s first trade, Wolfe Herd said the company is focusing its efforts on converting a larger portion of its user base to these paid customers by reinvesting in future monetization features and product offerings.
Bumble said in its S-1 filing that it had sales of $ 376.6 million for the first nine months of 2020 with a net loss of $ 84.1 million. For the same period in 2019, the company had sales of $ 362.6 million and net income of $ 68.6 million.
The company’s main competitor is Match Group, which owns Hinge, Tinder, and several other dating competitors and has a market cap of $ 45.5 billion.
Bumble recognized its competition but stated in its prospectus that online dating “is not a” winner-take-all “market”. The company said that on average, most people have two different dating apps on their phones.
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan led the offering.
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