(Reuters) – Dating app Bumble, which is backed by hedge fund giant Blackstone Group, on Friday made public its regulatory filing for an initial public offering, revealing steady revenue growth and higher operating costs that resulted in a loss.
Bumble Inc’s plans to go public come at a time when companies are seeking to capitalize on what has been the strongest IPO market in two decades.
Companies raised a record $168 billion through IPOs on U.S. stock exchanges in 2020, according to Dealogic data.
Bumble also revealed it had identified a material weakness in its internal controls over financial reporting and was taking action to rectify the issue.
The dating app, which has been immensely popular with millennials and competes with other apps such as Match Group’s Tinder, said it had 42 million monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2020, with 2.4 million paying users for the nine months ending September.
For the period from Jan. 29 to Sept. 30, Bumble’s revenue came in at $376.6 million, while it reported revenue of $362.6 million for the first nine months of 2019.
During the January-September period last year, Bumble swung to a net loss of $84.1 million, while it reported a net profit of $68.6 million during the first nine months of 2019.
Bumble filed for an IPO of up to $100 million, although that is a placeholder amount and is expected to change.
The company confidentially filed its IPO paperwork with regulators late last year. It plans to float its shares on Nasdaq under the symbol “BMBL”.
Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are the lead underwriters of the offering.
(Reporting by Anirban Sen in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
