Bumble’s chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down from the female-focused dating app she founded nearly 10 years ago, and will be succeeded by Slack CEO Lidiane Jones.
The leadership change will be effective as of Jan. 2, according to The Wall Street Journal, when Wolfe Herd will assume the position as executive chair.
Wolfe Herd was just 24 when she founded Bumble in 2014, where the defining feature is that only women can initiate chats with male suitors. (For users looking for a same-sex match, either person can reach out first.)
Bumble’s explosive initial public offering in 2021 briefly made Wolfe Herd a billionaire, when the app’s stock price surged 63% to $70.31 — peaking with a market cap of $20 billion — upon its debut.
However, the Austin, Texas-based company’s shares have since plunged in value, in premarket trading on Monday, when they slid 7.8%.
Bumble’s now trading below $14, and is worth $1.87 billion.
Bumble, whose largest shareholder is the private-equity firm Blackstone, will report its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday.
The company — which, like Tinder, is free to use but makes money through premium subscriptions and in-app purchases — has said it expects to see revenue in the range of $274 million to $280 million, which would represent year-over-year growth of as much as 19%.
“I want to be the person who is able to look around the corner and innovate for the future of Bumble Inc., and to take us 10 years ahead,” Wolfe Herd, 34, told The Journal ahead of assuming the role of executive chair.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Jones’ first order of business will be when she succeeds Wolfe Herd as CEO, though the 44-year-old Brazil native said she “really wants to embark big on AI.”
“AI and generative AI can play such a big role in accelerating people finding the right person, finding the right friends and the right community. There’s more that we think we can do,” Jones told The Journal.
Jones — a tech-industry veteran, with previous experience as an executive at Salesforce, Sonos and Microsoft — rose to the chief executive position at Slack Technologies earlier this year, when she succeeded its founder-CEO Stewart Butterfield.
She’s currently based in Cambridge, Mass., and won’t be relocating to Bumble’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, according to The Journal.
Representatives for Wolfe Herd and Jones at Bumble and Slack, respectively, did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Bumble isn’t alone in its struggles. Last week, Match Group, the dating app giant that owns Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge and Tinder — which Wolfe Herd co-founded before Bumble — reported earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations, but a soft fourth-quarter outlook that sent shares sliding.
Match Group’s total revenue for the latest quarter was $882 million, up 9% year over year and slightly better than the $880 million The Street expected.
Earnings were buoyed mostly by subscriber momentum at Tinder and price increases in the app’s premium features, Match Group said — including its new ultra-exclusive Tinder Select tier for $500 per month — which allow users unlimited “likes,” less advertisements and the ability to message before matching, among other perks.
However, Tinder projected lower-than-expected revenue for the final quarter of the year, and also said that it anticipates losing paying customers, which it blamed on a “focus on the holiday season in November and December.”