[9] Amidst the media attention surrounding the lawsuit, acquaintance, Badoo founder and CEO Andrey Andreev contacted Wolfe Herd via email, and the two met up.

[11] After the partnership was established, the pair recruited fellow Tinder departees Chris Gulczynski and Sarah Mick to design the interface and help launch Bumble.

[20] In February 2022, Bumble announced it had acquired Fruitz, a French-owned freemium dating app popular with Gen Z and used across Europe.

[22] Starting in April 2022, Bumble users who report abuse are eligible for a collection of free courses from Bloom, an online provider of support for assault survivors.

[23] By November 2023, its fourth-quarter earnings showed that inflation and growing competition with Tinder had reduced user spending on its app's paid features.

[24] The news coincided with its founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd stepping down and Slack's chief executive Lidiane Jones replacing her.

[32][33][34] This process changed in 2024 when Bumble launched Opening Moves; the feature allows female users to add prompts to their profiles for men to respond to.

[45] In 2020, the app introduced a wider range of gender identity options for users to identify as genderqueer or transgender, following an article by The Daily Dot.

In April 2018, Bumble added an option to sign up using only a phone number, following Facebook's involvement in a controversy with Cambridge Analytica.

[34] Bumble launched a photo verification tool in September 2016 to ensure that users of the app were the same people in their profile pictures.

[63] In February 2024, Bumble introduced Deception Detector, a machine learning model that detects fake user profiles.

[64][65] That March, Bumble collaborated with Phaedra Parks, Parvati Shallow and Peter Weber of the Peacock reality show The Traitors to launch the feature.

[72] In June 2021, Stripe software engineer Robert Heaton found a security vulnerability in Bumble that would allow an attacker to obtain the exact location of its users via trilateration.

[73][74] In August 2024, researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium found that several dating apps, including Bumble, had vulnerabilities that would allow bad actors to obtain users' locations via trilateration.

In 2019, the app launched Private Detector, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect and blur nude images.

[63] In 2019, Bumble helped pass House Bill 2789 in Texas, a law that makes electronic transmission of sexually explicit material a punishable offense.

[95][3] Wolfe Herd shared in an interview with Vanity Fair the concept behind the app: "If you look at where we are in the current heteronormative rules surrounding dating, the unwritten rule puts the woman a peg under the man—the man feels the pressure to go first in a conversation, and the woman feels pressure to sit on her hands...

[96][97] In August 2017, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer encouraged its readers to harass Bumble's staff to protest the company's support of women's empowerment.

[100] Following the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh, Bumble ran the “Believe Women” ad campaign and donated to RAINN.

[103] In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Bumble made additional donations to the ACLU of Texas and Planned Parenthood.

[104] In February 2023, writer Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz wrote that "it often seems like that feminist twist is more marketing fodder than meaningful change to how our apps run our love lives.

"[94] In March 2018, Match Group sued Bumble arguing that it was guilty of patent infringement and of stealing trade secrets from Tinder.

[107] In May 2024, Bumble faced major backlash after launching a marketing campaign that entailed putting up billboards with captions such as: "You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer".

[110] Bumble responded with a public apology, wherein the company said it would remove the ads and donate to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.