Bumble Inc. released its full-year 2025 results yesterday, and on first glance it didn’t look good. Revenue took a 10% nosedive last year to less than $1 billion—$966 million, to be precise. Paid users declined 11.5%. The drop-off seems to have accelerated; in the fourth quarter, that revenue drop was even steeper, almost 15%.
Some of this is across the dating industry—Bumble is feeling the pain at both of its flagship apps, Bumble and Badoo. (At competitor Match Group, which is more than three times Bumble’s size, revenue was flat year to year.) Some of these challenges are unique to Bumble, which once captured the cultural zeitgeist but has struggled for years to set a lasting strategy or find its footing in among women and Gen Z today.
Yet despite the bad news, Bumble’s stock has risen more than 35% since earnings. Why? Investors are optimistic about the changes Bumble is rolling out. The company laid off 30% of its workforce in mid-2025. Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who returned to the company a year ago, told investors yesterday that she cut performance marketing spend by 80%. She described a “deliberate shift away from volume-based acquisition and towards higher-intent, organically driven growth as we return to our roots of brand organic marketing.” “Despite raising the bar on new members and dramatically limiting marketing, Bumble app registrations and active users have stabilized,” she said. She argued that this proved two things: that demand for Bumble is still strong, and that the brand has “tremendous affinity” with Bumble’s target audience.
