Dating App Bumble Announces Rebrand and Other Milestones
Contributed by: kellyseal on Wednesday, August 05 2020 @ 07:04 am
Last modified on Wednesday, August 05 2020 @ 07:39 am
Female-forward dating app Bumble announced a major rebrand for the company as it also celebrated its milestone of reaching 100 million users worldwide. Parent company Magic Labs, which also owns popular dating app Badoo as well as Lumen and Chappy, will now be called Bumble under the direction of CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Together, the Bumble and Badoo apps have a total of 600 million users around the world. Bumble’s app hit its milestone number in July and will look to Badoo for help in expanding its global reach.
Wolfe Herd took over a year ago as CEO of Magic Labs when former CEO Andre Andreev left in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct at Badoo, the app company he founded, which employees said contributed to a hostile work environment. Herd’s vision is to be more diverse and inclusive when building dating apps and her companies, and to put social justice and gender equality front and center. Wolfe Herd oversees over 750 employees in Austin, London, and Moscow.
According to Fast Company[*1] , Bumble also announced a new Board of Directors and a new President, Tariq Shaukat, who comes from an executive position at Google Cloud. The Board will be led by chairwoman Ann Mather formerly of Pixar Studios, Pamela Thomas-Graham, former CEO of CNBC, Elisa Steele, chairwoman of Cornerstone, and Matthew Bromberg, COO of Zynga.
“They have been really encouraging and supportive of me,” Herd said to Fast Company. “They trust me. They trust my vision and want to be there as a support system and not a deterrent. They’ve given me the bandwidth to build this company into the company I’d always hoped for it to be. I didn’t always have the freedom or resources to do that to this degree.”
Herd has pledged that at least 15% of the company’s marketing expenditures will go toward black-owned businesses, and that the company is doing a “deep audit” of its staff to make sure that all levels of the company from entry to senior management are diverse. They are also analyzing their technology, “making sure it operates and functions in the most equitable and diverse format that best serves people in the margins,” she told Fast Company.
Herd also pointed out that Badoo will remain separate from Bumble (she doesn’t plan on combining the company’s star apps), but she does intend to develop Badoo to become the “best version” of itself.
Tech Crunch reported that Wolfe Herd will be speaking about the company’s direction and the future of the dating app industry as a whole at its Disrupter conference this September.