Bumble went public in 2021 valued at nearly $8 billion, built around a women-first approach to online dating. Five years later, with revenue and paying users declining, it has agreed to a $1.3 billion buyout.
Ithaca Holdings will acquire Bumble in an all-cash deal that will take the online dating company private, Bumble said Tuesday.
Bumble said its shareholders will receive cash considerations of $6.05 a share, representing a roughly 138% premium to the stock's closing price of $2.54 on Oct. 9, and valuing the company at $1.3 billion.
Shares of Bumble rose 56% to $5.94, pacing for their largest single-day percentage increase on record and their highest close since October 2025, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, and OKCupid, traded up 1.8%.
Bumble's stock performance on Tuesday would surpass a 49% surge on Monday, which came on the heels of The Wall Street Journal reporting Bumble was nearing a deal to go private.
Ithaca co-CEOs Ravi Gupta and John Hegemen will serve the same roles at Bumble, and they will partner closely with Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd to "extend Bumble's original vision to help people find connections in life and love into the next era."
Gupta was the chief financial officer of Instacart from 2015 to 2019, and Hegemen was the chief revenue officer of Meta Platforms from December 2024 to February 2026, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Trading just 12 cents below the acquisition price, Bumble shares suggest investors are confident the deal will close. Expectations for the transaction's completion now appear to be driving the stock rather than the company's underlying business.
Wolfe Herd, who was also the co-founder of Tinder, founded Bumble in 2014 with a women-first approach to online dating. The company went public in 2021 with an initial public offering price of $43 a share, valuing the company at nearly $8 billion.
Bumble's fortunes have reversed sharply since its 2021 debut, hitting a market capitalization of just over $580 million as of Monday's close. Annual revenue climbed from $765.7 million in 2021 to as high as $1.1 billion in 2024, before falling about 10% in 2025 to $966 million.
Its paying user base has also contracted, declining from 4.2 million at the end of 2024 to 3.2 million in its latest quarter.
The company has struggled to regain momentum as online dating platforms, including Tinder and Hinge, contend with softer user engagement. Revenue fell 15% in Bumble's second quarter, while the company has sought to revive interest in its flagship app by changing some of its features that once distinguished it from competitors.
Bumble said in August it would allow all users to send an opening message to someone they matched with, expanding from only allowing women to do so, in a strategy shift to try to grow its user base.
Going private could give Bumble greater flexibility to overhaul its business away from the scrutiny of public-market investors, though it remains unclear whether new ownership can stem the decline in paying users.
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