Bumble will lay off 30% of its staff around the world
The female-focused dating app revised its second-quarter revenue forecast under reinstalled CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd
Photo: David Paul Morris (Getty)
Bumble, the second-most-popular online dating site, is laying off 30% of its global staff, the company revealed in a securities filing. The company expects to save $40 million annually, which will be reinvested in product development.
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The news sent shares soaring more than 20% on Wednesday morning.
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Bumble's revenue was down 8% in the first quarter of 2025. Its total paying users was static, at approximately 4 million, but the average revenue per paying user was down 7.3%. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to her CEO role in March, after stepping aside in January 2024 to become executive chair. While announcing the layoffs, she revised Bumble’s second-quarter revenue forecast to be up 2.5%.
Bumble was founded in 2014 as a dating app where women make the first move, but also as a site for female friendship. In the top-four dating apps, it is the only one not owned by Match, which owns market leader Tinder as well as Hinge and PlentyOfFish.
While dating-app use has declined since 2020, three in 10 Americans use them. In recent years, singles have complained that the user experiences on these popular dating apps are getting worse as companies look for more aggressive ways to monetize, with features such as unlimited swipes and preferences locked behind paywalls, and an algorithm skewed to make you pay for the matches you want.
Bumble has benefited from the fall of the market leader: As Tinder dipped below 9 million downloads in 2024, Bumble was approaching that number. Hinge, which focuses on relationships rather than casual hook-ups, also rose.
Bumble’s Wolfe Herd announced new AI features last August, like Private Detector and Deception Detector. She also spoke of a future in which “concierges” message each other on a human’s behalf.
“There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges,” she said then. “And then you don’t have to talk 600 people. It could scan all of San Francisco for you and say these are the three people you really ought to meet. That’s the power of AI, if harnessed the right way.”
—Maxwell Zeff and Britney Nguyen contributed to this article.