After months of speculation, Austin-based dating and professional networking app Bumble Inc. filed paperwork Friday for an initial public offering.
It was not immediately clear how much the company hopes to raise from the IPO or what its valuation may be. In September, Bloomberg reported the company would seek a valuation of $6 billion to $8 billion.
If validated, that valuation would be a significant jump from valuations market observers and investors placed on the company previously. Last fall, reports said Bumble could be worth well over $1 billion, with some suggesting $3 billion might be a fair valuation.
Bumble filed confidentially for an IPO late last year. The new public filing with the SEC suggests the company will raise $100 million, although that is commonly a placeholder that gets updated later in the IPO process.
The company seeks to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker "BMBL."
Bumble has risen quickly since its founding by Whitney Wolfe Herd and Andrey Andreev in 2014. That's due in large part to its approach of having women make the first move.
"Throughout the journey of building Bumble, we were told that it wasn't possible to create a successful women-first brand and platform," Wolfe Herd wrote in the SEC filing. "That women don't, won't and shouldn't speak first. That it would never work. Those objections fueled us."
The company says women have made the first move 1.7 billion times since September 2014. It had 42.1 million monthly active users as of September, according to the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Bumble reported it had $360.1 million in revenue in 2018 and $488.9 million in 2019 — a 35% increase.
From Jan. 29, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2020, Bumble recorded nearly $376.6 million in revenue. For the same period, it had a net loss of $84.1 million, compared with positive net earnings of $68.6 million for the first nine months of 2019, according to the filing. Part of the reason for that major swing appears to be a significant jump in general and administrative expenses, which totaled $128.1 million for the 2020 period, versus $47.3 million for the first three quarters of 2019.
The filing notes that Bumble had more than 650 full-time employees as of Sept. 30 last year. About half of them work in engineering and product development. Roughly 560 of those employees are outside of the U.S.
Bumble's 10,000-square-foot headquarters building is near the intersection of North Lamar and 45th St. in Austin. It also has large offices in London and Moscow, in addition to small offices elsewhere.
The IPO is likely to bring yet another wave of attention to Austin's tech and startup scene, and it represents the type of well-known and fast-growing companies that many of Austin's startup leaders have been calling for in recent years as out-of-state tech giants expand their presence here.
"Everyone thinks we are becoming the next Silicon Valley, and, instead, we are really just being invaded by Silicon Valley," Molecula co-founder and CEO H.O. Maycotte recently told Austin Business Journal. "I look forward to seeing companies born and raised here develop our ecosystem by doing extraordinary things."
