Bumble Reportedly Files Confidentially For IPO

Dating app Bumble has filed confidentially for an IPO, Bloomberg reported Friday.

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The company reportedly plans to go public in February, possibly around Valentine’s Day, and could aim for a valuation between $6 billion and $8 billion, according to the report.

Austin-based Bumble is one of a number of popular dating apps to emerge in recent years, competing against Tinder and Hinge. The app is meant to be female-centric, with women making the first move. Since the company launched in 2014, it’s expanded beyond dating to Bumble BFF, where users can go to find friends, and Bumble Bizz, which is meant for professional networking.

Greycroft and Accel are among Bumble’s investors, according to Crunchbase.

Bumble’s confidential filing is among a number of companies to file confidentially late this week. Coinbase and UiPath also recently said they filed confidentially to go public, and on Thursday Poshmark publicly filed its S-1 registration statement.

All told, the IPO pipeline in early 2021 is shaping up to be robust with Roblox, Affirm, Poshmark, Coinbase, UiPath and now Bumble all contenders to go public. Expensify also plans to go public through a direct listing by summer 2021, Business Insider reported earlier this week. 

Next year’s likely momentum follows a busy 2020 for IPOs that occurred despite economic uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there was a lull in the tech IPO market in the first weeks of the pandemic, it eventually picked up. Some of the oldest unicorns and most anticipated IPOs have hit the public markets this year, including big data analytics company Palantir and home rental and accommodations giant Airbnb.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias