Whitney Herd
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Helping people find love has been Bumble's focus since day 1. What made Bumble successful from the start was simple but powerful. We built trust with women. That trust became our moat. It created a healthier, more balanced member base that drove engagement, retention, growth and a global brand. Historically, most dating products skewed male, leading to an uneven experience where women often felt overwhelmed and disengaged. Bumble changed that by putting women in control, creating trust, balance and a higher quality member base that produce better outcomes for everyone. Today, we have the brand long identified with putting women first and a deep understanding of what women want from love and connection. This brand identification is perhaps our biggest strategic asset. That's why we've returned to that core, winning with women because we believe that when women feel safe, respected and confident and when they meet quality matches, everything else improves. Connection becomes more meaningful, engagement more genuine and the business more sustainable. When I returned as CEO in March, the first thing we did was listen deeply and intentionally to women. What we heard across markets was consistent. People want to trust who they're meeting. They want better quality matches, and they want more authenticity. Those insights became the foundation of the quality over quantity reset I've been talking about over the past 2 quarters. Every step we have taken since our product updates, investments in AI and every marketing move ties back to one goal, making Bumble a better experience for women because when women are happy, the entire ecosystem thrives. That is the focus driving our transformation into the love company, expanding beyond dating to build the global platform for meaningful relationships, romantic and platonic. At its heart, what women seek on Bumble is love, and we are building the product, the technology and the brand to deliver it. Since our last call, we've executed this reset with real focus and urgency while also delivering on our financial commitments. For the third quarter, our results are near the high end of our guidance range for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We are also seeing the expected short-term effects of prioritizing quality over quantity. Member registrations are lower in the near-term, but we believe that the foundation of the business is getting stronger. Early indicators suggest that retention is improving and ARPPU is growing. The entire team is heads down, laser-focused on executing this plan. The early signs we're seeing just months into our reset reinforce our confidence in our strategy, and we look forward to sharing more details as we progress further and have more data and visibility into trends. We are working aggressively to improve the mix of engaged approved members on our platform, reduce the noise and build a higher quality community. Our Beehive Fit framework is how we are measuring our progress against these goals. We are emphasizing members who are verified, thoughtful and focused on finding love and connection while filtering out low intent profiles and bad actors. This transformation isn't about growth for growth's sake. It's about growing right. We're deliberately trading near-term volume for quality because that's what we believe builds long-term trust, stronger engagement and sustainable growth. Consistent with this goal, in August, we launched a major update to Bumble Date focused on trust and safety. This was more than a feature release. It was a foundational step forward. These updates were built directly from what we heard from members. Men told us they weren't getting enough meaningful interactions. Women told us the profiles they were seeing didn't give them the context that they needed to take action confidently. So we've built tools to close the gap. We introduced richer profiles that let people show more of who they are. We added stronger verification features like phone number verification and selfie video verification to increase confidence. And we launched our new coaching hub filled with content from relationship experts and a help hub to reduce the time it takes to get our members to resolutions for any problems on the app. These are not cosmetic changes. They are designed to create trust to make dating more rewarding because when women feel safe and inspired to show up as their full selves, connection becomes easier for everyone. The problem we're solving for isn't a demand problem. The desire for love and relationships is universal. To deliver on that desire, we have built a product road map that is defined by fixing our members' pain points. Let me spend a moment on exactly how we think about this. It starts with strengthening the foundation. When you ask members what their #1 complaint is with dating apps, it's really wanting more trust, safety and authenticity. The August update landed this first piece. We're building tools that guide members to put their best selves forward and engage with confidence. Between now and the spring, we'll maintain a steady drumbeat of releases, tangible improvements that reflect what we're hearing from our community. Individually, the tools and features we introduced may not sound game-changing, but taken together, they are the critical building blocks for addressing members' pain points. The second largest complaint members have is that they're not seeing who they want to see. This is about the fundamental technology that any dating app has to get right. A major portion of the work we are doing on the UI side is building better signal capturing so that we can supercharge our matching and recommendation engine. Right now is an incredible time in technology to be doing this. AI makes so much more possible. It unlocks the ability to reinforce and enhance our matching engine in ways we could never before. These AI-driven improvements won't necessarily be visible to members, but they will deliver what they want, more quality matches. How does that work? To get good matches, you need great signals. Great signals come from stronger profiles, which is why we are starting at this foundation. More robust dynamic profiles gives both sides of the marketplace more info to react to. This gives our matching engine the high-grade fuel it needs to deliver the best possible experience and outcomes faster. As we get these pieces right, you will see more member-facing innovation. More social tools, for instance, which are coming next year and behind the scenes, better customer service. We've already made a lot of improvements in response times and problem resolution through automation over the past year. We believe there's a lot more to accomplish here. Together, all of these components drive the experience of our members today and those yet to join our platform. We're being really thoughtful about how we're sequencing our work and what we're putting out there and when, which brings me to the final pain point. Members want all of the above, and they want the outcomes faster. Our AI-first cloud-native platform, which we expect to launch in mid-2026 will become the engine of Bumble's future, helping us personalize at scale, enhance safety further and continuously improve the experience for our members. This new platform is expected to give us the innovation speed and flexibility to adapt faster than ever before. It's how we'll turn insights from member behavior into meaningful real-time improvement. We see this new platform as the unlock to restoring long-term product-led growth. In parallel, we're building something entirely new, a stand-alone AI product that will become part of our portfolio. We believe it will be unlike anything else in the market, powered by our deep understanding of human connection and supported by the robust data, brand and infrastructure that already set Bumble apart. We have begun internal testing as well as getting direct feedback on the concept to ensure we get this right. While we continue to enhance Bumble Date, we're also broadening our ecosystem through Bumble BFF, built on our modern Geneva platform, the new BFF app combines friend matching with group management and event planning. It's the next step in transforming Bumble from a dating app into a full platform for connection, and it is already performing well with increased retention compared to the old app. Our primary audience in the near-term is Gen Z and millennial women, the same demographic that powers Bumble Date. In 2026, we will expand this even further, adding group and community discovery so people can more easily find their people and form real friendship offline. BFF is both a growth opportunity and a launch pad for new social experiences that we can apply across our portfolio, further strengthening Bumble's position as the place women choose for friendship, love and belonging. In Q3, we introduced our For the Love of Love campaign, a celebration of real success stories and real connections. It's a reminder of why people come to Bumble in the first place to find love in all of its forms. The reaction has been encouraging with a 4 percentage point improvement in awareness among single women in the U.S. aged 22 to 45. Our goal is simple: to be the most trusted, highest quality women-first platform in the world, the brand people turn to when they're ready for something real. Across Bumble Date, Badoo, BFF, we're more differentiated and AI-driven innovation, we are building a connected portfolio of love. We believe the work we are doing today is strengthening our business and setting the stage for durable, profitable growth. We are proud of the progress we are making, confident in our strategy and focus on execution. We have conviction in where we're headed, and we are so excited for the quarters ahead. Thank you so much for your continued support. And now I will turn it over to our new CFO, Kevin Cook, who I am happy to introduce to you all today. Kevin has already brought fresh perspective and strong operational discipline to the company, and I am so excited to have him here to round out our outstanding new senior leadership team.