Dating-app company Bumble
BMBL,
+7.32%
went public on Wednesday and saw its stock soar 64% in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday before tacking on a further 13% during Friday’s trading session.
Here are 5 things to know about Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who created the “women make the first move” dating app in 2014:
She’s a former Tinder executive
In 2012, Wolfe Herd started working for the Match Group
MTCH,
-1.51%
dating app Tinder, known for its leftward and rightward swipes. She
says she came up with the name “Tinder.”
She was vice president of marketing at Tinder during a period of huge user growth for the platform among young people.
Wolfe Herd left the company in 2014 and later filed a lawsuit against Tinder for sexual harassment — she received over $1 million plus stock as part of a settlement, according to reports.
Bumble IPO made her a billionaire on paper
Bumble’s market reception has made Wolfe Herd’s 21.5 million shares worth over $1 billion.
Of the 500 wealthiest people in the world, fewer than 5% are self-made women, according to Bloomberg.
Wolfe Herd was seen with her baby in a video marking Bumble’s debut on the Nasdaq.
She became the youngest female CEO to take a company public
At 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest female CEO ever to lead a company to an IPO, according to Business Insider.
In the past year, 560 companies have gone public, and Bumble is just the third among them with a female founder and eighth with a female CEO. Additionally, over 70% of the members on Bumble’s board are women, according to its SEC filing.
“Hopefully this will not be a rare headline,” Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg of Bumble’s being a female-led company. “Hopefully this will be the norm. It’s the right thing to do, it’s a priority for us, and it should be a priority for everyone else.”
She invested in another dating app called Chappy
In 2016, Bumble and Wolfe Herd invested in a dating app called Chappy. The app was designed for gay men in the U.K.
In 2020, the app was shut down and a merger with Bumble announced.
She championed legislation that made digital sexual harassment a crime
Wolfe Herd, who attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and whose company is headquartered in Austin, was a driving force for Texas legislation, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019, that made sending lewd photographs without permission a crime in the state.
The legislation made such acts a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine up to $500. Wolfe Herd testified in front of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence committee on the subject.
“It is time that our laws mirror this way we lead double lives, in the physical and the digital,” Wolfe Herd said. “You look at government right now, it only protects the physical world. But our youth are spending a lot more time in the digital world than they are in the physical.”
