Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Bumble's former parent company in 2019 ahead of the dating app's IPO

Bumble was originally created under the MagicLab parent company

When Blackstone acquired MagicLab in 2019, Bumble Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd was elevated to CEO of the entire parent company (which also owned Indian dating app Badoo). The parent company was rebranded as Bumble Inc.

Bumble's origin story includes a Russian billionaire, a Tinder cofounder, and a private jet.

Bumble went public with an IPO in 2021

That year, Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest female CEO to ever take a company public. The company pivoted during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, focusing its marketing strategy on promoting social-distanced dating and its video chat features.

Bumble's valuation peaked at roughly $13B around the time of its 2021 IPO

As of April 17, 2026, its market cap was roughly $550M. Experts attribute the decline to a multitude of factors, including slowing user growth and increased competition from Match Group-owned dating apps like Hinge.

Dating app Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is considered the youngest self-made female billionaire.

Whitney Wolfe Herd's return as CEO boosted Bumble's declining stock price

While the uptick didn't last, when Bumble announced Founder Wolfe Herd's return in 2025, shares rose in premarket trading and later that day. Investors likely hoped that her strategy could restabilize the business.

Listen to a 2026 interview where Bumble's CEO said its stock is down 96% since its IPO 'for no reason'

CEO and Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd said the company is still performing very well. She added that the business makes $1B per year and referred to it as profitable. She went on to say "who knows what people trade stock on?" and that she believes the stock market has written Bumble off as if it were debt

Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd sued Tinder for sexual discrimination and harassment

Wolfe Herd, who cofounded Tinder and was its VP of marketing, left the company in April 2014 after dating a Tinder cofounder who became "verbally controlling and abusive." In September of that year, she received a more than $1M settlement from her lawsuit against the company.

Dating app Bumble laid off roughly 30% of its staff in June 2025

Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd was criticized at the time for telling staff to "calm down" during a company-wide call informing staff of the layoffs. "I see a lot of freaking-out emojis, y'all need to calm down … everyone's going to have to be adults in dealing with this," she said on the call. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Hulu debuted a movie about Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2025.

Bumble's ill-received 2024 rebrand included ads encouraging users to stop being celibate

The ads were meant to promote a new option on the dating app that allowed men to message first in opposite-sex matches—a significant change to the app's signature "women make the first move" feature. Bumble later apologized for the ads on Instagram. Bumble shares fell 54% after the brand removed the signature feature and allowed men to message first.

Bumble debuted its 'Bumble BFF' feature in 2016

Rather than helping users find romantic matches, Bumble BFF helps people make platonic, friendship introductions. The feature now operates as a standalone app, "Bumble for Friends," built on top of Geneva, a company that Bumble acquired in 2024.

The dating app Hinge markets itself as 'designed to be deleted'

Harvard graduate Justin McLeod started Hinge in 2011. Since then, despite competition from larger apps like Bumble and Tinder, it's grown into the third-largest dating app by market share in the US, bringing in roughly $396M in revenue as of 2023.

Dating apps adopted 'freemium' business models as the market became more saturated

As dating app user growth slowed and companies like Tinder saw increased competition from upstarts like Bumble and Hinge, the industry has pushed for subscription tier adoption due to pressure from investors for predictable profits and more.

The top three US dating apps by market share are Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge

While Tinder took up about 25% of US dating app market share as of 2024, Bumble wasn't far behind at 24%. Up-and-comer Hinge sat in third place with 18% of US market share.

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd wanted the movie about her life shut down

Wolfe Herd was informed about the movie after its creation process had been started. Her lawyer told her there was nothing she could do. She said she was both terrified of the movie and slightly flattered by its existence.

Read about why Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd stepped down as CEO in 2024 only to return in 2025

When Wolfe Herd stepped down as CEO in 2024, assuming an executive chair role, she said she was eager to return to her "founder roots" and do more big-picture thinking. However, when her replacement as CEO, the former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, left the company "for personal reasons," Wolfe Herd once again assumed the CEO role. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

The way dating apps make money is changing

As downloads fall across the industry, dating apps are trying to stay competitive by adding paywalls to their business models. The more than $6B dating app industry is largely dominated by Match Group, the parent company of both Tinder and Hinge. This video explores how AI and human behavior are changing the industry one right swipe at a time.

The prototype for Tinder was created during a 2012 hackathon

By August 2012, Tinder, which was originally called Match Box, had launched on the Apple App Store. Match Group merged Tinder into its portfolio in 2017, the same year it set its sights on acquiring Hinge. Experts say that Match has not been declared a monopoly in part because monopolies are "hard to prove."

In 2023 and the first half of 2024, Berkshire Hathaway bought back more than $12B of its own stock

In the second half of 2024, the company—and Buffett—decided to buy up shares of Domino’s Pizza, Pool, Sirius XM Holdings, and Liberty Media. They also decided to sell Capital One, Ulta Beauty, and Nu Holdings, among others. Learn why Buffett is buying and selling these stocks and what it could mean for the financial conglomerate.

Larry Fink cofounded BlackRock with a $5M investment from Blackstone cofounder Stephen Schwarzman in 1988, before officially severing ties with Blackstone in 1994.

More than $3.5B has been invested through AngelList

AngelList was created to connect startups and angel investors. It’s evolved since its 2010 founding and has been used by companies like Uber and OpenSea.

One Facebook investor turned $500K into $1B

Peter Thiel was Facebook's first big investor. In 2004, he invested $500K into the social network, long before the company owned Instagram or renamed itself "Meta." In 2012, when he sold off most of his stake, he turned that initial $500K investment into more than $1B in cash.

The dating app industry's average customer acquisition cost exceeds $40 per user

This relatively high cost of customer acquisition (according to 2022 data from saturated markets) makes profitable growth increasingly difficult for dating apps, which is why many have pivoted to focusing on their subscription tiers for reliable revenue.

A larger share of LGBTQ+ individuals use dating apps than their straight counterparts

Roughly a quarter of LGBTQ+ adults reported using a dating app in the past year as of 2022. The trend seems to have persisted as the years have gone on, with apps like Grindr geared toward the community seeing significant revenue growth in recent quarters as of 2025.

Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are among the world's top 20 private credit fund managers

While Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager, Apollo Global Management is a large private equity firm. Apollo had $480B in private credit assets under management as of January 2025.

PetSmart and Hilton are among 10 of the most famous leveraged buyouts in history

Some of the most famous leveraged buyout deals include Blackstone's 2007 acquisition of Hilton Hotels, in which Blackstone took the then-public company private and then returned it to the public markets in 2013. A British PE firm bought PetSmart for $9B in 2014—one of the most expensive leveraged buyouts since 2007.

US IPO issuance—the total dollar amount of new stock sold to the public via IPOs—hit a record high in 2026.

BlackRock acquired Merrill Lynch's asset management division, bringing in more than $500B in assets and pushing the firm's total assets under management above $1T in 2006.

The Black Lives Matter movement coincided with the fall of the girlboss

It’s no coincidence that the white women who were seen as the faces of the girlboss movement (founders such as Audrey Gelman of The Wing and Christene Barberich of Refinery29, for instance) stepped away from their companies around the same time that America stepped into its era of racial reckoning with Black Lives Matter.

Citadel founder Ken Griffin has a $1.5B property portfolio

Take a look inside Griffin's real estate portfolio, from a $1B home in Palm Beach to his New York City penthouse on Billionaire's Row.

The dot-com boom made Mark Cuban a billionaire

Cuban co-founded AudioNet with Todd Wagner in 1995 before it became Broadcast.com—a web app that allowed people to listen to sports commentary on their computers if they couldn't watch a game. In 1999, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B. By the time the market crashed, Cuban had already sold most of his stock in the company and had become a billionaire.

Uber's first investors included StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp

In 2010 when Uber went out to raise money, prominent investors including Mark Cuban and Gary Vaynerchuk passed. Vaynerchuk actually said no twice.

Digital coupon platform Groupon IPO'd in 2011 at a $17.8B market cap, but as of 2024 was worth just $103M—a 99.4% decrease.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65B in stock during its second year

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B, only two years after its launch. Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture firms, was an early investor in the streaming video platform, seeing it as the next step in the evolution of user-generated content that flourished online during the mid-2000s.

The world's 50 most valuable private companies

While public companies typically have the highest valuations, private companies get close. This list breaks down the top 50 as of 2025, with SpaceX at the top with a value of $350B, followed by ByteDance. Over three-fifths of the list are located in the US, with eight in China.

Elon Musk reshaped Twitter into X with bold moves and polarizing decisions

What began in early 2022 as Musk quietly buying Twitter shares soon escalated into a $44 billion hostile bid to take the company private. When Musk officially took over Twitter, he walked into headquarters carrying a literal kitchen sink, captioning the moment, "Let that sink in."

Learn how the algorithms behind Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and other dating apps work

Formerly based on the Elo rating system, which ranks chess players, the Tinder algorithm is built on user data, with more time spent on the app providing more data on user preferences from which to customize potential matches. OkCupid's match percentage algorithm relies on overlaps in users' search preferences and responses to a subset of over 4,000 questions.

Understanding TikTok-owner ByteDance's business model

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

Meta's acquisition strategy for Instagram and WhatsApp led to a 5-year-long antitrust lawsuit

In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta as part of the agency's efforts to rein in big tech companies. The FTC alleged that Meta overpaid for Instagram and WhatsApp in a "buy or bury" strategy to gain access to those companies' talent and diminish competition. In 2025, a federal judge sided with Meta, citing intense change in the social media landscape.

BlackRock played an integral role in the Federal Reserve's response to the Great Recession, managing about $30B of hard-to-sell Bear Stearns assets on behalf of the New York Fed.

The controversial 'Peloton Wife' ad from 2019 cost the company more than $1B in market value

The 2019 ad of a man gifting his wife a Peloton exercise bike sparked a wave of controversy, with some calling the ad sexist and fatphobic. The ad's backlash decreased the company's market value by $1.6B.

In 2025, ByteDance agreed to sell the app's US branch

In 2024, US lawmakers passed a requirement for parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the country, which the company challenged in court. After several extensions granted by President Trump, ByteDance agreed to sell the company's US branch to a group of US investors, including Oracle, which will oversee the app's security and cloud computing.

A 'unicorn' is a private company with a $1B-plus valuation

Just like a horse with a spiraling horn on its head, private companies with a more than $1B valuation are rare creatures. But unlike the mythical creature, this type of “unicorn” is occasionally spotted in the wild. Unicorn companies include SpaceX, OpenAI, Skims, and more.

Many of the 2010s girlboss-era founders experienced a public fall from grace in 2020

In the 2010s, dozens of female founders were celebrated on the covers of business magazines like Inc. for their recent startup success, from Emily Weiss’s Glossier makeup brand to Steph Korey’s Away luggage company. But many of these companies were also the subject of large takedown articles around the year 2020.

Tinder revolutionized dating when it introduced swipe-based interactions

Many dating apps today allow users to "swipe right" to match with someone and "swipe left" to opt out of the match, but Tinder did it first, introducing swipe-based interactions in 2013. The idea for swipes came from the founder's desire to gamify dating—Tinder's early interface was based on a deck of cards that users could sort.

Spotify went public in 2018 with a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO.

TikTok boasts nearly 1.8B monthly users

The app has surged in popularity recently, with usage surging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those users have generated high revenues, too, with over $23B in 2024.

The TikTok sale went through in January 2026

The app's ownership is now majority American, though TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who is Chinese, remains on the board of directors. It's unclear what, if anything, has changed for American users, as the company has historically kept the specifics of its algorithm a secret.

See a database of large companies owned by private equity firms

The Private Equity Stakeholder Project tracked more than 200 companies owned by private equity with more than 7,000 employees. Companies on the list include J. Crew, Jersey Mike's Subs, Barnes and Noble, Panera Bread, and Tropical Smoothie Cafe.