Bumble Inc. (BMBL) Business

Item 1. Business

Who We Are

Bumble’s mission is to bring people closer to love. Our platform of apps enables people to connect and build healthy and equitable relationships on their own terms. We focus on building authenticity and safety in the online space. We also have extended our platform beyond online dating into healthy relationships in other areas of life, such as friendships.

The Bumble brand was built with women at the center. Our platform is designed to help women feel safer and more empowered and, in turn, provide a better environment for everyone. We are leveraging innovative technology solutions to create a more inclusive, safe and accountable way to connect online for all members regardless of gender.

In 2025, we operated a family of apps, including Bumble app, Bumble For Friends app, BFF app and Badoo app, where members come to discover new people and connect with each other in a secure and empowering environment. Our apps monetize via a freemium model, where the use of the service is free and a subset of the members pay for subscriptions or in-app purchases to access premium features.

Bumble app, launched in 2014, is one of the first dating apps built with women at the center. Bumble app is a leader in the online dating sector across several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. We had approximately 2.4 million Bumble App Paying Users during the year ended December 31, 2025.

Badoo app, launched in 2006, was one of the pioneers of web and mobile free-to-use dating products. Badoo app’s focus is to make finding meaningful connections easy, fun and accessible for a mainstream global audience. Badoo app is a leader in the online dating sector in several countries in Europe and Latin America. We had approximately 1.2 million Badoo App and Other Paying Users during the year ended December 31, 2025.

Building on the BFF mode in Bumble app, in July 2023 we officially launched a standalone Bumble For Friends app and, in September 2025, we relaunched Bumble For Friends app as BFF app in the United States. BFF app is a friendship app for friend-finding, group connections and community-building.

Bumble was built on a simple truth: when technology is built with women's experience at its core, it makes the experience better for everyone. It is this belief that ensures that our values guide our business decisions, and our business performance enables us to drive impact. Our strategy is anchored by our powerful brand, product leadership, operational excellence, and public policy and social impact initiatives. Our mission drives our business in tangible ways:

•We strengthen our brand by leading on safety and accountability. Beyond our in-app features, we advocate for policies and industry standards that address online harms, helping to create a safer digital ecosystem.

•We engage in global nonprofit partnerships to support healthy, safe and respectful relationships, and to further our commitment to equity by supporting women and other underrepresented communities.

•We enhance our brand through marketing centered around elevating women, including our multi-year partnership with the Women's National Basketball Association.

We believe that the best way to compete in a world where people have multiple ways to connect is through product innovation. We uniquely design our products to facilitate engagement prioritizing safety and accountability across the member experience. We continuously collect member feedback, which informs our product development roadmap. The more we know about our community’s interests, the better we can innovate products that maximize their chances of meeting in person and making connections most likely to turn into the relationships they are seeking.

Our apps share some common infrastructure, which allows insights to be shared between apps and is critical to providing our members with personalized and superior experiences. Our team has a strong track record of product leadership in online dating. We were the first company in the dating app industry to develop technology to proactively blur lewd photos shared within a chat, which we open-sourced in 2022 for the technology community as part of a larger effort to help rid the internet of “cyberflashing,” the sharing of unsolicited lewd photos online. We are also continuously introducing new artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance our members' experience and safety, such as detection of inauthentic profiles and usage, and to improve our matching algorithm to help Bumble app members see the most relevant potential matches. In addition, the insights we have gained from our community have encouraged us to extend Bumble app into many more areas of life, such as platonic friendships, and we have built our platform with the flexibility to pursue these opportunities.

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Our Technology Has Transformed Online Dating

Technology is at the core of what differentiates our platform. We have a global team of software engineers and product managers who drive the development of our platform. We release live updates rapidly, often once a week to our mobile app and twice a day to our server backend, allowing us to run dozens of tests simultaneously across the entire audience. The rapid nature of our testing framework allows us to optimize the member experience. Our technology and product teams work hand in hand from ideation to product launch, and this has allowed us to be at the forefront of releasing features geared towards improving the safety of our community.

Our technology platform is fueled by:

•Shared infrastructure: Our shared infrastructure allows us to quickly test new features, provides us with flexibility to migrate features from one app to another where appropriate, and improves execution at scale by driving faster improvements in our apps, while simultaneously driving operating efficiencies by reducing the cost of launching new features. Given our shared infrastructure, we can also innovate and scale efficiently as we enter new geographies and new categories outside online dating. Moreover, in seeking to acquire companies, we look for opportunities to leverage our shared infrastructure (for example, our content moderation capabilities) to accelerate their product roadmap.

•Our data and machine learning capabilities: We are continually analyzing data from member interactions on our platform, allowing us to constantly optimize the member experience. We have introduced artificial intelligence capabilities that we leverage to personalize the potential matches we display, inform our product pipeline and otherwise tailor the experience for specific members. Our artificial intelligence capabilities play a key role in creating a safe environment for our members, providing protection against identity fraud as well as blocking inappropriate behavior and content from polluting our platform.

•Our data protection and privacy standards: We are both committed and mandated to adhere to strict privacy standards, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and the GDPR as it applies in the United Kingdom by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (“UK GDPR”) and several state laws in the United States (each as discussed below in “—Licensing and Regulation”).

Bumble App

On Bumble app, members can input information about themselves and set up a profile, which can be customized in many ways, such as by adding a Badge to prominently display certain values or characteristics. We use a matching algorithm combined with the preferences provided by members to recommend potential connections. Members can opt to use one of our filters to be more specific in the types of matches they see. A member can swipe right to vote “yes” to a potential match, or left to go to the next profile, or, in most of our markets, leave a note (formerly "compliment") on a bio, specific photo or profile prompt on someone’s profile. When both members vote yes, a connection is made. After an initial match is formed, members on Bumble app must initiate a chat within 24 hours or the connection disappears. In some of our markets, in a heterosexual connection, Opening Moves gives women the option to set a question that their matches can respond to, adding more ways to open a conversation. They can also choose to use a photo and caption as their Opening Move, or write their own Opening Move. For non-binary and same-gender connections, either person can set and respond to an Opening Move.

In addition to prioritizing verification of member photos and offering communication like voice and video chat tools to allow interactions before or in lieu of in-person meeting without exchanging sensitive personal information, we have also engineered other safety features such as our proactive safety monitoring. This feature uses machine learning to identify harassment and identity-based hate, which is then flagged to moderators to review and action appropriately according to our Community Guidelines, which are available on our website. Another safety feature is "Review before you send", whereby a member may be prompted to review and edit a message before it is sent if the content could be harmful, offensive or inappropriate or doesn't meet our Community Guidelines.

Our subscription offerings, Bumble Boost, Bumble Premium, and Bumble Premium+, provide members with additional features to increase their success in making a meaningful connection. There are also additional, in-app purchases that subscribers and non-subscribing members can purchase, such as SuperSwipe (to inform potential matches that the member is confidently interested in them) and Spotlight (to increase the member’s visibility).

Badoo App

On Badoo app, members’ profiles can be customized in many ways, such as by using the “Moods” feature to share what's on their minds, either based around their current emotions or what kind of date they want to pursue. Badoo app has a similar matching algorithm to Bumble app and the same vote “yes” or “no” methodology by swiping right and left, respectively. It allows members the option to directly message anyone who is of interest without having to mutually vote yes.

On Badoo app, we have engineered safety features such as Rude Message Detector, which uses machine learning to detect any text that could be perceived as rude, abusive, homophobic or discriminatory and gives the member the control to dismiss the message if they are not comfortable with the language used.

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Our subscription offerings on Badoo app, Badoo Premium and Badoo Extra, allow additional features such as: Liked You, which allows members to find out who has already liked them; and Invisible Mode, which allows members to browse the app without being shown to other members. Badoo app also offers Badoo Credits, which can be purchased in bundles and used to acquire in-app features such as one-off popularity boosts.

Bumble For Friends App

Bumble For Friends app works in a similar way to the Bumble app. When two members vote “yes” by swiping right on a profile, a connection is made. Either member can initiate a chat. On Bumble For Friends app, we help members start conversations using icebreaker questions based on members’ public profile information, with the help of generative artificial intelligence. Any member with two or more connections can create a group chat, and using the Plans feature, members can easily organize an in-person meetup.

BFF App

In September 2025, we relaunched Bumble For Friends app as BFF app in the United States. BFF app is a friendship and community app that combines one-to-one matching with group discovery and participation. Members create profiles that are customizable with bios, photos and free form text tags. Members can connect with others through a waving (“Says Hi”) and matching experience similar to Bumble For Friends app. When two members “Say Hi” to each other, a match is formed and either member may initiate a chat. Members may also join or create interest-based groups and communicate via chat rooms, forum rooms, audio rooms and video rooms. BFF app’s matching algorithms use a member’s profile information and discovery preferences (location and age) to recommend members and groups they may be interested in.

BFF app provides groups with tools for collaboration (polls) and organizing in-person activities. Group organizers can create events, manage event details and maintain a shared calendar visible to group members. Both group membership and individual event RSVPs can require approval, providing organizers additional control over participation and engagement.

BFF app incorporates multiple safety and security features. The app integrates technology that mitigates fraud, bot activity and other malicious behavior. Members can verify their identity using the photo-based Verify Selfie feature, which helps confirm profile authenticity. Automated systems evaluate profile information, photos and messages for potential violations of our policies, using machine learning models to detect harmful or inappropriate content. Content flagged by these systems is escalated to trained human moderators, who review and take action in line with our Community Guidelines.

How We Grow Our Community

We are investing in growing our community by building our apps as distinct brands with complementary but unique member value propositions. For example, for Bumble app, we educate audiences on how empowering women to feel safer and more confident in dating can create healthier relationships. Badoo app is about helping people overcome the self-doubt they might feel, to open themselves up to others, embrace the journey of meeting people to figure out what they want. Bumble For Friends app and BFF app are about recognizing, creating and celebrating meaningful local friendship and community for people in all stages of life.

Each of our apps has a specific brand and marketing approach that is appropriate for its business model, stage of maturity and local market nuances. For example, our Bumble app marketing leverages large-scale campaigns alongside hyperlocal IRL (in real life) experiences to connect with our core audience in their cities.

Our brands’ marketing strategies are especially effective due to our centralized performance marketing, partnership, and creative functions. These centralized functions enable us to share marketing learnings across our apps and geographies, allowing for the broadest application of successful strategies.

Our Impact

Since the founding of Bumble app, we have established, engaged in, and supported a wide range of public policy and social impact efforts to further our mission, primarily focused on women’s empowerment, healthy relationship education, and the reduction in toxicity on our platform and society at large. These include:

•Engaging Experts to Make our Platform Safe: We leverage both internal and external experts to continuously improve upon our policies and community guidelines. For example, we are a member of the Tech Coalition, an industry body that shares best practices to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation online. In November 2025, based on our partnerships with The Survivor Hub (peer-based support service for survivors of sexual assault), Chayn (global charity powering Bloom, our online trauma support program for survivors of sexual assault and relationship abuse) and LoveSaid (fraud/romance scam think tank), together with the Australian National Anti-Scam Centre we co-designed and implemented a pilot of an online romance scam support group to inform our approach to supporting victims impacted by online romance scams.

•Policy Advocacy and Legislation Efforts: In 2021, we launched a campaign in the UK to support the enactment of a law that makes the unsolicited sending of nude images illegal, and in October 2023 the Online Safety Act was passed, which criminalized cyberflashing. In 2024, we supported the inclusion of cyberflashing as a serious form of online violence in the EU Directive to Combat Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, which became law in May 2024. In 2025, we

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continued to work on policy initiatives aimed at promoting standards for safer online spaces for women. In the UK, we supported and contributed to the development of guidance by the UK regulator of communications services (Ofcom) to help companies create safer online experiences for women and girls.

•Sustained Dialogue on Online Safety: Through our public policy-led initiative “Brunch with Bumble,” a series of conversations prioritizing the safety of women online, we keep an “always on” spotlight on safety issues in various regions. In 2025, we hosted a roundtable discussion in Sydney, Australia, with academia, women’s safety organizations, victims of online violence, researchers and Australia's online safety regulator (eSafety Commissioner) to discuss what societal, technical and regulatory interventions are still needed to create lasting systemic changes in combating gender-based violence online.

Human Capital

Our company culture and people practices are critical to achieving our mission of bringing people closer to love, and our values are rooted in respect, excellence, curiosity, courage and joy.

Belonging

We believe that the diversity of our management team and workforce and our commitment to create an inclusive workplace are key to our success and reflects our mission and values. We strongly encourage people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and non-binary people, veterans, parents, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people to apply to work with us. We seek to be fully reflective of the communities we serve around the world. As of December 31, 2025, 78% of our Board and more than 50% of our management team were women. As of December 31, 2025, we had approximately 580 full-time employees, of which approximately 64% resided in Europe, with 36% and 1% in the Americas and APAC, respectively. Our employee population spans 14 countries and represents a wide range of cultures, backgrounds, experiences, ages, genders, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, nationalities and ethnicities.

We are committed to ensuring a level playing field in hiring and promotions, fostering an inclusive culture and maintaining a diverse workforce through a wide range of company initiatives in compliance with all applicable laws. Central to this effort is the establishment and growth of our Employee Resource Groups (“ERG”s), which serve as vital hubs for connection, learning, and community-building. Through these groups, we encourage collaboration, mentorship, and networking, while also providing a platform for employees to influence and shape our organizational culture.

As part of our broader Belonging strategy, we administered a voluntary self-identification campaign in 2024 to help us gain a more complete picture of our multi-dimensional workforce. Improved representation data across our workforce helps us shape programs that reflect our employees’ unique experiences, identify gaps in support, and strengthen our global Belonging efforts.

Talent Acquisition, Development & Retention

We continue to compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, particularly people with expertise in computer science, software engineering, product development, data science and engineering and machine learning. Our ability to recruit top talent is driven by our mission-first orientation, meaningful and impactful work, commitment to employee development, health and wellbeing and our brands’ reputation.

We invest in development to help employees grow and build their careers. We sponsor training, education and leadership development opportunities for our employees designed to provide them with the knowledge, skills and habits necessary to succeed in their jobs and careers.

To build an organization where employees feel engaged, valued and heard, we gather and respond to employees’ feedback in a variety of ways, including through periodic employee engagement surveys, new joiner surveys, one-on-one interactions, and regular

“All Hands” meetings that bring the entire company together. Participation in our most recent employee engagement survey was active, with approximately 75% of eligible employees completing the survey. We maintain open lines of communication to help us understand our employees’ needs so that we can continuously improve as an employer of choice for our current and future employees.

Benefits, Safety & Wellbeing

The success of our business is fundamentally connected to the wellbeing of our people. We continue to invest in benefits that help our employees and their families, support the Bumble mission, and align with market practice across five key health pillars: physical, mental, financial, family, and social.

We offer a competitive benefits package, which includes: access to private healthcare coverage for employees and their families; paid six-month leave for all qualifying parents regardless of gender; path to parenthood support and reproductive health benefits, which include a reimbursement of up to $10,000 for family planning and reproductive health services not fully covered by our insurance programs; unlimited paid time off; and paid leave for survivors of domestic violence or violent crimes.

All employees have access to a wellbeing portal where we provide a wide range of mental health support services to assist employees when they need it. These services include 24/7 confidential employee assistance programs and paid therapy and personal coaching

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sessions for employees and their dependents. Alongside this, we also help prepare our employees for a secure future by investing in initiatives for financial and retirement planning.

The psychological safety and wellbeing of our employees remain among our top priorities. Our internal trust and safety teams have dedicated mental health support provided by licensed and accredited psychologists, i.e., wellbeing specialists, with specialization in vicarious trauma and evidence-based practice. This program provides access to one-to-one digital therapy, monthly group psychoeducational sessions, monthly manager and leadership development sessions within the trust and safety context and a wellbeing platform for self-learning on topics specific to content moderation.

Competition

The online dating industry is highly competitive. We compete with a number of companies that provide dating products and services for the same markets in which we operate, including other online dating platforms and social media platforms. In addition, we compete with offline dating services, such as in-person matchmakers, as well as more traditional forms of dating that involve people meeting offline without the use of dating products or services altogether. Because of the extensibility of the Bumble app platform beyond dating, we also compete with social media and networking platforms in that context.

Intellectual Property

We believe that our rights in our intellectual property, including but not limited to patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks and domain names, as well as contractual provisions and restrictions on access to our proprietary technology, are important to our marketing efforts to develop brand recognition and differentiate our brand from our competitors. We own a number of trademarks that have been registered, or for which applications are pending, in the U.S. as well as in certain foreign jurisdictions. These trademarks include, among others, BUMBLE, BUMBLE FOR FRIENDS and BADOO. Our registered trademarks are effective for varying periods of time and may be renewed periodically, provided that we, as the registered owner, or our licensees where applicable, comply with all applicable renewal requirements including, where necessary, the continued use of the trademarks in connection with the goods and services for which they have been registered. We expect to pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe they would be beneficial and cost-effective.

In addition to trademark protection, we own numerous domain names, including www.bumble.com, and patents and designs for various product features. We also enter into, and rely on, confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants, contractors and business partners to protect our inventions, trade secrets, proprietary technology and other confidential information. We further protect the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in both our member terms of use on our website and in our vendor terms and conditions. For information regarding risks related to our intellectual property, please see “Item 1A—Risk Factors—Risks Related to Intellectual Property.”

Licensing and Regulation

We are subject to a variety of laws and regulations in the United States and around the world that involve matters central to our business. Many of these laws and regulations are still evolving and being tested in courts, and could be interpreted in ways that could have a negative impact on our business. These laws may relate to privacy and data protection, online safety, rights of publicity, content, intellectual property, advertising, marketing, distribution, data security, electronic contracts and other communications, artificial intelligence, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, telecommunications, taxation, economic or other trade prohibitions or sanctions, anti-corruption law compliance, securities law compliance, online payment services, and labor and employment. We currently, and from time to time, may not be in technical compliance with all such laws. Foreign data protection, privacy, content, competition, and other laws and regulations can impose different obligations or be more restrictive than those in the United States. U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, which in some cases can be enforced by private parties in addition to government entities, are constantly evolving and can be subject to significant change. As a result, the application, interpretation, and enforcement of these laws and regulations are often uncertain and difficult to predict, particularly in the rapidly evolving industry in which we operate, and may be interpreted and applied inconsistently from country to country and inconsistently with our current policies and practices.

Proposed, new and evolving legislation and regulations, as well as evolving interpretations of and practices around certain regulations, could also significantly affect our business. For example, the implications of GDPR and UK GDPR, which apply to our processing of personal data in connection with certain products and services, are far-reaching and responses to these continue to develop. In addition to these laws, there are a number of legislative proposals in the EU as well as other jurisdictions that could impose new obligations or limitations in areas affecting our business. There are other privacy and data protection laws and regulations that impact the products and services we offer to members in different countries. In the United States, there are a number of existing state laws, such as those in California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Illinois, as well as others that are to come into force in the coming years, in addition to a potential comprehensive federal privacy statute. Agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission are increasing their enforcement efforts and considering adopting new privacy rules. New privacy laws or regulations are likely to grant enhanced privacy rights to individuals and impose obligations on us as a business operating in those jurisdictions. In addition, some countries are considering or have passed legislation requiring local storage and processing of data or similar requirements that could increase the cost and complexity of delivering our services. For information regarding risks related to these compliance requirements, please see

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“Item 1A—Risk Factors—Risks Related to Regulation and Litigation—We must monitor and, where applicable, comply with rapidly evolving laws and regulations relating to privacy, data protection and/or artificial intelligence across jurisdictions, and the failure to do so could result in claims, changes to our business practices, monetary penalties, increased cost of operations, or declines in member growth or engagement, or otherwise harm our business.”

In addition to privacy laws, there are new and emerging online safety laws globally such as the EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act and U.S. laws targeting companies that operate online dating services, which include significant penalties for non-compliance. There is also a developing trend for online safety codes to target specific industries such as the online dating industry (for example, in Australia, the Relevant Electronic Services Code has come into effect). Such online safety laws and codes may require us, in the future, to change our products, business practices or operations, which could adversely affect member growth and engagement and increase compliance costs for our business.

The foregoing description does not include an exhaustive list of the laws and regulations governing or impacting our business. See the discussion contained in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report for information regarding how actions by regulatory authorities or changes in legislation and regulation in the jurisdictions in which we operate may have a material adverse effect on our business.

Additional Information

Bumble Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on October 5, 2020. Our principal executive offices are located at 1105 West 41st Street, Austin, Texas 78756, and our telephone number is (512) 696-1409.

Our website address is www.bumble.com and our investor relations website is located at https://ir.bumble.com. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report. The Company files electronically with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) required reports on Form 8-K, Form 10-Q, and Form 10-K; proxy materials; ownership reports for insiders as required by Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”); registration statements on Forms S-3 and S-8, as necessary; and other forms or reports as required. Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act are available free of charge on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations website. The contents of these websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this report or in any other report or document we file.

Website and Social Media Disclosure

We use our websites (www.bumble.com and ir.bumble.com) and at times our corporate Instagram account (@bumble), X account (@bumble) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/company/bumble) to distribute company information. The information we post through these channels may be deemed material. Accordingly, investors should monitor these channels, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. In addition, you may automatically receive e-mail alerts and other information about Bumble when you enroll your e-mail address by visiting the “E-mail Alerts” section of our website at ir.bumble.com. The contents of our website and social media channels are not, however, a part of this Annual Report.