Bumble, the dating app where women make the first move, has declared it won't sell itself to Match Group, the dating app giant that owns Tinder, OkCupid and others.
The declaration, outlined in a blog on the company's site, comes after a lawsuit was filed last week alleging that Bumble is infringing on patents obtained by Tinder, which was later acquired by Match Group.
The post is a rarity for a startup facing a lawsuit by a big company, especially given the high likelihood that Match Group would pay hundreds of millions to acquire Bumble. Bumble's response is not only defiant, it almost seems to challenge Match Group to continue their case.
"We swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and, now, to intimidate us," Bumble wrote on its blog. "We'll never be yours. No matter the price tag, we'll never compromise our values."
The blog is largely a message to Bumble's users, the media and, of course, Match Group. It does not, however, get into the legal weeds of the lawsuit Match Group filed against Bumble last Friday.
That case centers on a “matching process system and method” used to mutually select a potential date, among other things.
Beyond the patents, there’s a lot of history here.
Bumble was formed after former Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Tinder in 2014, which was later settled, and went on to launch her own company.
Since then, news has surfaced twice that Match Group has tried to acquire Bumble for as much as $450 million. Then, in February, Match executives seemed to foreshadow their patent claim during an quarterly earnings call when they mentioned a patent for its double blind opt-in feature.
Match did indeed file a patent for such technologies in 2013 when Wolfe Herd was still with Tinder — but it didn’t list her as an inventor. Bumble quickly grew to become one of the most dominant dating apps around, largely because it required women to make the first move to connect for a date.
Earlier this year, Tinder added a feature similar to Bumble's where women make the first move. But, unlike Bumble, it was not a default feature.
