The IPO Buzz: Bumble’s Hot Date with The Street

Bumble (BMBL proposed) is getting ready for her first big date with the Street – and it looks like one hot pre-Valentine’s Day match. The mobile dating app, which gives the woman the power to make the first move in a match with a man, priced its IPO tonight at $43 a share on 50 million shares to raise $2.15 billion, Investor’s Business Daily and TechCrunch reported Wednesday evening. Those terms exceed Bumble’s recently increased terms of 45 million shares at $37 to $39, which were disclosed early Monday in an S-1/A filing with the SEC. (The pricing terms were indicated in revised SEC filings late Wednesday, but the company has not made an official pricing announcement yet.)

The latest headlines confirm the buzz that Bumble’s IPO was attracting swarms of orders for its IPO, ahead of its NASDAQ debut on Thursday – just before the long V-Day weekend. Bumble increased the deal’s size by 70.9 percent on Monday to 45 million shares at $37 to $39, up from its initial size of 34.5 million shares at $28 to $30.

“It’s off the wall – in a good way,” is how one big trader described the interest in Bumble’s IPO around midday on Wednesday.

The phones started ringing at IPOScoop around 6 a.m. EST today with traders seeking more information on Bumble.

“It’s smokin’ hot. I’d say the demand is just about insatiable. There’s been no let-up in the interest, even after the big bump up in its size,” a seasoned IPO professional said on Tuesday.

Principal stockholders Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and CEO of Bumble, and Blackstone, the private equity firm, will control most of the voting power of Bumble’s outstanding stock after the IPO.

Ms. Wolfe Herd, at age 31, becomes the youngest woman founder and CEO to take her company public, with the pricing of Bumble’s IPO, Insider reports. She has put women in control of Bumble’s board, with eight of the 11 board seats – including the chair – filled by women, The Washington Post reports. Ann Mather, the board chair, also serves as a director on the boards of AirBnB (ABNB), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Netflix (NFLX), according to the prospectus.

Ms. Wolfe founded Bumble in 2014 with help from Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev. She started Bumble after she left Tinder, where she was a co-founder and the vice president of marketing.

Bumble, based in Austin, Texas, reported about 2.4 million average Total Paying Users as of Sept. 30, 2020, up 18.8 percent from that date in 2019, the prospectus says. Total revenue rose to $416.6 million for the nine-month period that ended Sept. 30, 2020, up from $362.6 million for the same period in 2019. Bumble App revenue rose to $254.8 million in the first nine months of 2020, up from $203.4 million in the same period in 2019. The company also owns Badoo, a popular mobile dating app in Europe and Latin America.

Bumble’s market cap was estimated at $7.96 billion, based on the $43 IPO price reported Wednesday night. That’s more than twice its market cap in 2019 when Blackstone bought the company from Mr. Andreev in a deal valued at about $3 billion.

The Bumble IPO is deemed as one of “the deals of the week,” along with Cloopen (RAAS), the Chinese cloud company, traded today at around $32, double its $16 IPO price, after jumping 200 percent in its Tuesday debut to close at $48 on the NYSE, and Viant Technology (DSP), the California ad software company, trading today at $47.72, up more than 80 percent from its $25 IPO price, in its NASDAQ debut. 

Bumble is going public in a hectic week for IPOs. About 30 deals, including about 16 SPACs so far, are expected to get priced this week.

The strong IPO Calendar this week is being buoyed by the U.S. stock market’s rally to record highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 62 points on Wednesday to close at 31,437.80, surpassing the record it set Monday. The S&P 500 dipped today after setting a record high on Monday, while the Nasdaq Composite Index also declined slightly on Wednesday, after its record high on Tuesday – its 10th record this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Bumble is often compared with rival dating app company, Match Group (MTCH), the parent of OKCupid, Tinder, Plenty of Fish and a host of other dating apps. Match’s stock closed today at $171.07. Match went public in 2015 at $12 a share. On Tuesday, Match announced that it was buying Hyperconnect, a South Korean social network and mobile video dating app, in a deal valued at $1.7 billion.

The Bumble IPO’s joint book-runners – Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, RBC Capital Markets and Evercore ISI – were said to be conducting a modified Dutch auction.

The co-managers of Bumble’s IPO include a mix of big Wall Street names along with smaller investment banks whose owners and/or C-suite executives are women, African Americans, Latinos and disabled American military veterans. Here’s the list: Blackstone Capital Markets, BMO Capital Markets, Cowen, Raymond James, Stifel, BTIG, Nomura, SMBC Nikko, AmeriVet Securities, C.L. King & Associates, Drexel Hamilton, Loop Capital Markets, R. Seelaus & Co., Ramirez & Co., Siebert Williams Shank and Telsey Advisory Group. (Somewhere the spirit of Muriel “Mickie” Siebert is smiling. She was the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the founder of Muriel Siebert & Co., which became part of Siebert Williams Shank, after Ms. Siebert died in 2013.)

The attraction between Bumble and the Street was said to be so strong that if they happened to be a couple on a first date in your neighborhood restaurant, no doubt the other patrons would want to shout out: “Get a room!”

Stay tuned.

(For more information about these companies, please click the hyperlinks, which will take you to the IPO profiles on IPOScoop.com.)

(Never trade on proposed symbols. You might wind up owning something on the OTC Bulletin Board.)

Disclosure: Nobody on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned above, nor do they trade or invest in IPOs. The IPOScoop.com staff does not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.

Disclaimer: A SCOOP Rating (Wall Street Consensus of Opening-day Premiums), is a general consensus taken, at press time, from Wall Street and investment professionals concerning how well an IPO might perform when it starts trading. The SCOOP Rating does not reflect the opinions of anyone associated with IPOScoop.com. The SCOOP ratings should not be taken as investment advice. The rating merely reflects the opinion of the professionals at the time of publication and is subject to last-minute changes due to market conditions, changes in a specific offering and other factors, such as changes in the proposed offering terms and the shifting of investor interest in the IPO. The information offered is taken from sources we believe to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee the accuracy.